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PRESENT-DAY 
CHINA 

A  NARRATIVE  OF  A 
NATION'S  ADVANCE 

BY 
GARDNER   L.   HARDING 

Author  of  "Tsingtao:  Key  to  What?,"  etc. 

fllustrateO 


■)   -^  -? 


NEV^  YORK 

THE  CENTURY  CO. 

1916 

FEB  18 

3U()n4 


Copyright,  1916,  by 
The  Century  Co. 

Published,  May,  1916 


/M  *.» 


TO 

MABEL  HARDING 

WHO,   THOUGH  NO  AUTHORITY   CM   THE 

CHINA  QCESTIOK, 

ALONE    MADE    THE   WRITING   OF   THIS  BOOK 

WORTH    WHILE 


FOREWORD 

When  I  arrived  in  China  in  May, 
1913,  constitutionalism  was  at  the  height 
of  its  power,  the  one  seemingly  perma- 
nent result  of  the  Revolution  of  1911. 
When  I  left,  the  principal  opposition 
party  to  the  President,  the  Kuo  Ming 
Tang,  had  been  outlawed  and  destroyed, 
the  Parhament  had  been  broken  up,  the 
leaders  of  constitutionahsm  and  of  the 
First  Revolution  had  lost  the  Second 
Revolution,  and  had  left  the  country 
with  a  price  on  their  heads.  "Wlien  I 
started  to  write  this  book,  the  repubhc 
was  threatened  by  a  monarchy;  when  I 
had  finished  it,  Yuan  Shih-k'ai  had  de- 
clared himself  Emperor.  While  I  was 
reading  the  proof,  the  monarchy  move- 


viii  FOREWORD 

ment  collapsed,  and  the  republic  was  re- 
sumed. As  it  finally  leaves  my  hands, 
the  South  is  again  in  revolution  and 
Yuan  is  fighting  a  formidable  secession 
movement  whose  outlook  is  far  from  un- 
promising. I  recount  these  various  and 
successive  somersaults  merely  to  remind 
the  reader  that  he  who  writes  about 
China  touches  a  nation  that  in  these 
present  days  is  vital  with  continual 
change.  Contemporary  history  always 
looks  ridiculous  to  the  next  generation; 
and  present-day  China  has  experienced 
the  equivalent  of  a  generation  of  change 
several  times  since  1911.  In  spite  of 
these  embarrassments,  the  privilege  of 
writing  of  the  mental  background  of  a 
people  of  such  incessant  wakefulness 
and  vitality  is  worth  the  journalistic 
risk  of  being  out  of  date  when  your 
book  comes  out.  And  after  all,  the 
struggle    for    liberty    and    nationhood 


FOREWORD  ix 

which  is  the  real  narrative  of  this  na- 
tion's advance  so  far  is  stirring  enough, 
and  potent  with  meaning  enough  for 
the  Western  World,  to  tempt  us  to  con- 
sider what  China  has  shown  us  now  be- 
fore we  try  to  digest  her  next  revolu- 
tion. 

I  have  attempted  in  the  following 
pages  to  interpret  the  quality  of  mind 
which  produced  the  Chinese  Revolution, 
if  not  intimately  at  least  sympathetic- 
ally, to  the  western  world.  This  book 
is  an  impression  of  people  and  things 
rather  than  a  history  of  events  and 
causes.  You  "old  China  hands"  who 
may  call  my  account  superficial,  you 
have  your  authorities  and  your  preju- 
dices; keep  them:  this  book  is  not  writ- 
ten for  specialists.  It  is  written  with 
enthusiasm  for  Young  China  and  with 
respect  for  Old  China,  and  it  is  dedi- 
cated to  those  among  the  American  and 


X  FOREWORD 

English  people  to  whom  I  know  I  can 
confidently  appeal  to  honor  Young 
China's  long  and  bitter  fight  upward 
through  the  darkness — the  darkness 
through  which  the  Chinese  Revolution 
of  1911  will  always  shine  as  a  beacon 
light  of  Oriental  freedom. 

New  York,  AprU  17,  1916. 


CONTEXTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I    WHAT  THE  REPUBLIC  HAS  MEANT 

TO   CHINA 3 

II    THE  WOMAN'S  PART       .....     38 

III  SOCIAL   REFORM 68 

IV  RADICALISM  AND  THE  RADICALS  .     97 

V    LEADERSHIP     AND     YUAN     SHIH- 

K'AI 142 

VI    CLUTCHING   HANDS 191 

VII    THE   FUTURE 233 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Raw   Material   for   China's    Industrial 
Future Fiontispiece 

Battered  Revolutionists 26 

Miss   Tang  Chiin-Ying 42 

Dr.   Mary    Chang  and   Her  Intrepid   Red   Cross 
Corps 58 

Scenes  at  the  Metropolitan  Prison 74 

A  Section  of  Peking's  Semi-Military  Police    .      .     90 

A  Typical  Group  of  Revolutionary  Leaders  .      .  123 

The  Old  and  the  New  in  Locomotives  ....  234 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 


WHAT    THE    REPUBLIC    HAS    MEANT    TO 
CHINA 

IN  a  crisis  of  history  like  the  present 
time,  when  history  moves  so  rapidly 
and  with  such  savage  strokes  of  sudden 
change,  the  immediate  past  tends  to  be- 
come almost  mythical.  In  fact,  a  cer- 
tain unreality  seems  to  hang  about 
everything  that  took  place  before  the 
Great  War.  The  iron  of  power  is  in 
our  thoughts  and  understandings,  and 
national  movements  toward  liberty 
when  the  nation  that  makes  them  can- 
not protect  itself  from  outside  aggres- 
sion, seem  just  a  little  irrelevant.    They 


4      PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

fail  to  stir  us  so  deeply  now  that  we  have 
measured  the  chasm  that  a  universal  ap- 
peal to  battle  has  cloven  in  the  civiliza- 
tion of  Europe. 

Our  state  of  mind  is  hopelessly 
wrong,  but  it  will  be  a  long  time  before 
the  forces  which  have  created  it  shall  re- 
lax. Meanwhile  it  says  much  for  our 
loss  of  perspective  that  the  most  ro- 
mantically interesting  event  of  our  time, 
the  revolution  which  created  the  Repub- 
lic of  China,  has  drifted  up-stage  behind 
the  terrible  drama  of  Europe  at  war  to 
a  place  where  it  already  appears  half 
myth  and  half  failure. 

Certainly,  to  our  current  judgments, 
that  state  of  mind  seems  mythical,  I  ad- 
mit, in  which  people  could  have  spoken 
of  this  event,  of  so  little  mihtary  impor- 
tance, as  the  "French  Revolution  of 
Asia."  And  its  miraculous  success, 
the  abrupt  transformation  of  the  old- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA       5 

est  and  most  conservative  monarchy  in 
the  world  into  a  republic  with  a  Social- 
ist president — how  stunning  have  been 
the  subsequent  reactions  with  which  his- 
tory has  restored  the  balance  after  such 
an  enormous  anti-climax.  To  those 
who  look  at  China  from  abroad,  the 
failure  of  the  Revolution  seems  over- 
whelming. Where,  they  ask,  are  the 
leaders  that  created  it,  where  is  the 
Parliament  they  estabhshed,  the  na- 
tional party  they  built  up,  the  free 
press  through  which  they  spoke  to  the 
people,  the  visions  of  social  reform,  of 
equality  for  women,  of  popular  educa- 
tion, and  above  all,  where  is  that  high- 
spirited  campaign  of  rights-recovery 
from  the  foreigner  with  which  the  lead- 
ers of  the  early  Revolution  came  nearer 
to  making  the  Chinese  consciously  one 
people  than  has  ever  been  done  before? 
The  answer  is  that  the  leaders  of 


6      PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

1911,  the  men  of  the  Sun  Yat-sen  party, 
are  again  conspirators  before  the  State 
as  they  had  been  for  fifteen  years  be- 
fore 1911  itself.  Their  republic  has 
been  replaced  by  a  government  which 
is  not  so  liberal  as  a  constitutional  mon- 
archy, but  which  still  pays  them  the  re- 
luctant tribute  of  clinging  to  the  name 
and  the  form  of  republican  institutions 
at  the  very  moment  when  Yuan  Shih- 
k'ai  is  doing  his  utmost  to  repeat  the 
coup  d'etat  of  Louis  Napoleon. 

The  two  houses  of  Parliament  and 
the  eighteen  provincial  assemblies  which 
carried  the  idea  of  political  representa- 
tion deep  into  the  minds  of  the  people, 
are  to-day  only  memories;  the  press, 
that  enormous  crop  of  newspapers 
.which  sprang  up  in  every  quarter  of 
China,  extravagant,  untrained,  but 
spreading  seeds  of  education  and  stimu- 
lating  the   growth   of   public   opinion 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA       T 

throughout  the  literate  classes  of  the 
people,  and  by  the  inevitable  contagion 
of  the  time  deep  into  the  minds  of  the 
illiterate,  too — has  been  reduced  within 
hmits  thoroughly  docile  and  respectable. 
Women  no  longer  figure  in  Chinese 
'public  life,  social  reform  is  nowhere  an 
issue,  and  the  heavy  hand  of  the  Gov- 
ernment is  laid  on  the  hundred  and  one 
other  insurgencies  of  youth  and  radical- 
ism which  gave  to  China  during  1911 
and  1912  an  immense  and  attractive  vi- 
tahty  that  caught  and  held  the  imagi- 
nation of  the  world. 

I  am  a  partizan  of  the  Revolution. 
But  in  asserting  that  the  fine  achieve- 
ments of  the  Revolutionists  have  been 
broken  at  the  hands  of  the  personal  des- 
potism of  Yuan  Shih-k'ai,  I  am  not  in- 
voking sympathy  for  these  men,  nor  am 
I  trying  to  excuse  them  for  their  many 
fatuous  blunders  of  overconfidence  and 


8       PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

their  priggish  notions  of  governing  a 
country  hke  China  by  that  narrow  the- 
ory-ocracy  which  brought  about  their 
humihation  and  downfall  as  soon  as  a 
master  of  intrigue  like  Yuan  Shih-k'ai 
felt  strong  enough  to  challenge  them. 
I  am  not  concerned  with  their  achieve- 
ments. I  have  spent  the  years  since  the 
Revolution  looking  for  those  achieve- 
ments, and  even  when  I  was  in  China, 
a  whole-hearted  supporter  and  a  close 
friend  of  many  of  the  Revolutionary 
leaders,  I  realized  what  an  insurmount- 
able task  I  would  have  to  face  in  telHng 
an  Occidental  audience  what  the  Revo- 
lution had  done.  To  have  inspired  a 
people  with  the  sense  of  a  national 
cause,  to  have  shown  them  for  the  first 
time  in  their  history^  a  patriotism  worth 
dying  for,  to  have  created  among  an  an- 
cient and  democratic  race  an  intense  de- 
sire to   be   democratic   along  modern 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA       9 

standards,  and  to  have  erected  a  scaf- 
folding on  which  a  great  nation  might 
be  built  in  harmony  with  the  liberal 
plans  of  the  modern  world — all  this  is 
not  "doing"  anything  in  the  sense  that 
concrete  achievements  embodying  it  can 
be  brought  forward  as  a  test  against  the 
materialistic  formulas  of  the  Western 
world.  But  if  the  Chinese  Revolution 
has  failed,  its  failure  is  worth  emulating 
by  the  peoples  whose  governments  run 
smoothly  over  the  indifferent  minds  of 
a  sluggish  people.  I  do  not  believe 
that  it  has  failed,  for  I  do  not  believe 
that  it  is  finished.  But  I  shall  be  con- 
tent in  trying  to  tell  what  the  republic 
has  meant  to  China  if  I  give  you  not  a 
test  of  success  or  failure,  but  the  qual- 
ity of  mind  which  produced  that  repub- 
lic, and  how  far  that  quality  of  mind  is 
representative  of  and  has  been  shared  in 
by  the  masses  of  the  Chinese  people. 


10     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

The  Chinese  Revolution  was  a  glo- 
rious failure.  And  in  nothing  is  either 
its  glory  or  its  failure  more  apparent 
than  in  its  military  phases.  The  Revo- 
lutionary army  was  beaten  when  the 
truce  was  called  at  Shanghai  in  Decem- 
ber, 1911;  and  for  all  my  prejudices  in 
favor  of  the  Revolutionists,  I  have 
never  been  able  to  believe  that  they 
would  have  been  successful  against  the 
trained  soldiers  of  the  North  had  that 
conflict  gone  on.  But  they  had  shown 
the  world,  and  far  greater  than  that, 
they  had  proved  to  themselves  that  the 
best  blood  of  the  Chinese  people  was 
willing  to  die  rather  than  that  the  Revo- 
lution should  not  be  accomplished. 

It  is  not  safe  for  any  nation  to  pride 
itself  on  the  absolute  success  of  past 
revolutions.  We  Americans  can  derive 
the  most  chastening  reflections  about 
liow  far  our  revolution  against  England 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     11 

was  successful  by  reading  General  Up- 
ton's "^lilitary  Policy  of  the  United 
States,"  the  first  courageous  book  in 
American  history  which  dares  to  com- 
bine with  the  glory  of  our  boastfulness 
and  of  our  defiant  courage  at  attempt- 
ing such  a  revolution  the  actual  failure 
of  our  arms.  Nor  could  the  French 
Revolution  have  appeared  to  the  French 
in  1816  as  anything  like  the  military 
success  which  we  believe  to-day  it  really 
was.  It  is  the  inspiration  of  a  revolu- 
tion which  makes  it  an  integral  part  of 
that  nation's  history ;  given  that  inspira- 
tion, real  success  is  certain.  And  no- 
body can  deny  that  the  Chinese  Revolu- 
tion for  all  its  military  failure  was  fol- 
lowed by  the  Chinese  Republic,  a  regime 
which  represented  and  will  always  rep- 
resent the  most  effectual  and  dramatic 
break  with  the  past  ever  made  in  Chi- 
nese history. 


12     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

The  fighting  along  the  Yang-tse 
River  during  the  first  revolution,  espe- 
cially at  Hankow,  has  never  been  prop- 
erly described,  because  no  Chinese  his- 
torian has  yet  written  it  in  a  form  avail- 
able for  Western  readers.  But  un- 
questionably the  splendid  courage  of 
the  Revolutionists,  many  of  them  green, 
untrained  boys  who  had  never  fired  a 
rifle  before  in  their  lives,  showed  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai  that  although  he  might  defeat 
the  South,  it  would  take  a  long  and  san- 
guinary campaign  in  which  the  loyalty 
of  his  own  troops  could  not  always  be 
relied  upon  to  stand  the  strain,  espe- 
cially as  they  were  fighting  only  for  the 
none  too  certain  fleshpots  of  JNIanchu 
tyranny  against  the  infectuous  despera- 
tion of  a  newly  awakened  Chinese  na- 
triotism. 

That  patriotism  was  as  aamu'able  as 
it  was  novel.     In  the  early  days  of  the 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     13 

campaign,  several  companies  of  South- 
erners arrived  without  arms,  and  rather 
than  wait  for  them,  they  went  into  bat- 
tle unarmed,  aided  in  the  charge  on  the 
Hankow  railway  station,  and  got  rifles 
and  ammunition  by  driving  the  North- 
ern regulars  out.  The  foreign  nurses 
and  doctors  had  the  greatest  difficulty 
in  keeping  seriously  wounded  men  in  the 
hospital.  Scores  of  them  escaped  and 
returned  to  the  firing  line  again.  Chi- 
nese mission  school  students  in  Canton 
and  other  Southern  cities,  who  formed 
the  famous  "Dare  to  Die"  corps,  fought 
in  the  ranks  beside  artizans,  coolies,  and 
professional  soldiers ;  and  a  never-to-be- 
forgotten  band  of  Chinese  nurses  from 
Shanghai  which  arrived  on  the  scene 
three  days  after  the  fighting  com- 
menced, worked  incessantly  on  the  open 
battlefields  and  in  a  roughly  furnished 
tea  hong  in  the  Russian  quarter  of  Han- 


14     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

kow  day  and  night,  going  without  food 
for  twelve  hours  at  a  stretch,  and  hav- 
ing the  narrowest  escapes  from  death 
and  worse  at  the  hands  of  the  savage 
Northern  soldiery. 

If  there  is  anybody  who  doubts  that 
there  was  a  military  side  to  the  Chinese 
Revolution,  let  him  read  this  account 
by  a  missionary  eye-witness  of  a  crucial 
day's  fighting  toward  the  end  of  the 
campaign  at  Hankow: 

The  battle  at  Kilometer  Ten  was  a  splendid 
exhibition  of  gameness  and  pluck  on  the  part  of 
the  rebels.  Although  they  were  outnumbered 
two  to  one  by  the  trained  forces  of  Imperialists 
in  front  of  them  and  were  subjected  from  the 
flank  to  a  racking  cross  fire  from  Admiral  Sah's 
war-ships,  they  held  their  ground  until  nearly 
five  hundred  had  been  killed  and  fifteen  hun- 
dren  wounded.  At  last  they  were  compelled  to 
retire.  Their  ranks  were  broken  but  there  was 
no  panic.  The  advance  of  the  Imperialists  was 
a  splendid  justification  of  the  training  which 
the  Northern  troops  have  received  under  Euro- 
pean   instructors.     Ten    thousand    strong    they 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     15 

crossed  into  the  rebel  territory  during  the  night 
and  attacked  the  entrenched  rebels  at  daybreak 
Friday  morning.  These  were  behind  well- 
planned  fortifications  and  had  little  to  fear 
from  the  attack.  It  was  the  guns  of  Admiral 
Sah's  fleet  that  finally  decided  the  day  against 
them.  Sah's  eight  ships  approached  the  rebels' 
position  soon  after  the  advance  of  the  Imperial 
troops  began,  but  did  not  fire  a  shot.  After  a 
little  while  the  eight  ships  finally  silently  re- 
tired as  if  they  had  decided  not  to  participate 
in  the  engagement.  Later  they  returned,  this 
time  ready  for  business.  The  range  was  short 
and  the  guns  mercilessly  poured  in  shells  upon 
the  rear  of  the  rebels'  position.  The  slaughter 
was  appalling.  The  rebels  replied  ineffectively 
and  were  finally  silenced.  Gun  boats  drew 
nearer  and  the  revolutionists  were  compelled  to 
retire.  The  Loyalists,  whose  losses  were  slight, 
advanced  on  the  abandoned  trenches  in  splendid 
order  under  cover  of  the  ships,  capturing  fifteen 
field  guns  and  taking  many  Republicans  pris- 
oners. 

But  the  rebels  were  not  yet  satisfied.  They 
returned  to  the  fray  in  the  afternoon,  bringing 
reenforcements,  fresh  field  guns,  and  maxims. 
They  advanced  at  double  quick,  cheering  like 
eager  schoolboys.  They  attacked  the  Royalists 
vigorously,  but  the   fight  was   one-sided.     The 


16     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

trained  Imperialist  soldiers  racked  the  armed 
rebels  in  front  of  them  with  their  rapid  firing 
guns  and  modern  rifles,  but  the  rebels  held  their 
ground  gamely,  but  were  ultimately  compelled 
to  withdraw.  They  saved  their  field  guns  and 
carried  off"  their  wounded. 

At  daybreak  five  thousand  revolutionists  at- 
tacked the  Imperialists  immediately  westward 
of  the  Concessions.  A  vigorous  engagement 
ensued  and  the  rebels  recaptured  the  main  rail- 
way station.  They  also  captured  a  Maxim  gun 
and  field  gun.  The  Imperialist  lines  then  were 
reenforced  by  three  thousand  men  at  noon.  On 
their  spirited  advance  in  a  movement  to  out- 
flank the  rebels,  hundreds  were  killed  and 
wounded  on  both  sides,  and  a  large  additional 
block  of  buildings  had  to  be  taken  over  by  the 
Red  Cross,  for  the  increasing  batches  of 
wounded  soldiers  from  both  sides.  The  Rebels 
showed  reckless  courage,  which  was  certainly 
their  main  asset;  one  of  them  stood  for  an  hour, 
in  an  exposed  position  within  range  of  the 
enemy,  waving  a  flag  and  calling  on  his  com- 
rades. They  charged  in  close  formation,  fac- 
ing unflinchingly  the  deadly  Maxims,  disre- 
garding cover,  and  firing  without  stopping  to 
aim.  The  Imperialists  probably  inflicted  ten 
times  the  losses  they  sustained  but  the  Rebels 
were  their  match  if  not  their  masters  in  sheer 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     17 

courage.     The   one    idea   of   these    Southerners 
seemed  to  be  to  go  forward  at  any  cost.  .  ,  ." 

The  point  is  not  that  the  Chinese  first 
discovered  courage  in  1911.  Wlien 
properly  trained  they  have  always  been 
splendid  fighters.  It  was  General  Gor- 
don who  came  to  China  to  put  down  the 
Taiping  rebellion  during  the  middle  of 
last  century  who  said  that  he  had  never 
in  his  life  seen  hand  to  hand  fighting  of 
such  reckless  determination  as  he  saw 
among  the  Chinese.  What  the  Chinese 
discovered  in  1911  was  a  national  spirit. 
The  fighting  which  gave  it  its  peculiar 
inspiration,  the  inspiration  of  all  revolu- 
tions, was  the  fighting  of  men  and  boys 
who  dared  to  go  untrained  and  unpre- 
pared into  battle  for  an  idea. 

That  is  the  kind  of  courage  for  which 
the  Revolution  has  stood  in  China,  and 
it  is  still  a  well  of  emotional  power  for 
which  the  Chinese  may  draw  the  next 


18     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

inspiration  in  their  struggle  for  free- 
dom. iTlie  Second  Revolution  of  the 
summer  of  1913,  though  a  tragic  and 
hopeless  event  from  the  start,  was  full 
of  this  courage. 

One  instance  will  show  lis  quaUty. 
The  city  of  Nanking,  the  intellectual 
capital  of  the  South,  wavered  for  some 
time  during  the  Second  Revolution  on 
account  of  the  presence  in  the  city  of 
troops  of  several  factions  who  had  not 
cast  their  lot  with  the  "Punish  Yuan" 
uprising.  Ultimately  it  went  over  de- 
cisively against  the  Government,  and 
three  armies  from  the  North  came  down 
to  besiege  it.  There  were  in  the  city 
considerably  under  ten  thousand  troops, 
while  the  besieging  armies  numbered 
well  over  twenty  thousand.  The  best 
known  troops  in  the  city,  who  controlled 
the  operations,  were  the  now  famous  8th 
Hunan   regiment.     By   the    time    the 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     19 

siege  really  began  the  revolution  was 
crushed  and  the  defenders  of  the  city 
faced  almost  certain  capture  or  death, 
and  considering  the  characters  of  the 
armies  against  them,  both.  They  held 
the  Northern  armies  off  for  more  than 
three  weeks,  during  which  desperate 
fighting  occurred  almost  every  day. 
Dm'ing  this  time  they  had  the  city  ab- 
solutely at  their  mercy.  They  were  re- 
sponsible to  no  one,  they  had  no  hope 
of  future  relief  and  no  fear  of  future 
censure.  And  yet  during  the  whole 
siege  the  life  of  the  city  went  on  under 
their  protection.  They  kept  the  elec- 
tric lighting  system  going  during  the 
thick  of  the  bombardment,  they  took 
not  a  single  thing  from  the  wealthy 
shopkeepers  or  the  poor  stall  and  bazaar 
merchants  for  which  they  did  not  pay  a 
fair  price.  And  as  honorably  as  they 
kept  the  city  so  did  they  fight.     Eight 


20     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

times  they  were  driven  off  Purple 
JNIountain,  the  hill  which  commands  the 
city  from  just  outside  the  southeast 
gate,  and  seven  times  they  recovered 
their  ground.  When  they  came  down 
the  hill  they  brought  the  breech-blocks 
of  their  guns,  and  when  they  went  back 
again  they  put  them  in  and  turned  their 
fire  once  more  on  the  enemy.  Their 
desj)erate  courage  thinned  their  ranks 
terribly.  When  the  city  was  finally 
captured,  there  were  too  few  of  them 
to  make  an  effective  resistance,  but  thej'^ 
never  surrendered.  A  body  of  them 
escaped  into  the  hinterland  up  the  river, 
the  shortest  way  home  to  Hunan. 

When  the  government  troops  got  into 
the  city,  there  was  nobody  in  Nanking 
but  who  saw  the  ironic  contrast  they 
made  with  the  Revolutionists.  Chang  v 
Hsun,  the  principal  general,  gave  over 
the  city  for  three  days  to  loot  and  plun- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     21 

der,  and  when  I  walked  down  the  fa- 
mous five-mile-long  main  street  of  Nan- 
king on  the  third  day,  there  was  not  a 
shop  but  what  had  been  broken  open, 
smashed  up,  and  cleaned  out.  Rich  or 
poor,  republican  or  loyal,  private  or 
government,  made  no  difference.  The 
post  and  telegi'aph  offices  suffered 
worse  than  the  rest,  and  the  customs 
building  was  burned  to  the  ground.  At 
the  end  of  the  third  day  they  began  on 
the  women.  Fires  were  started  here 
and  there,  and  JNIanchus  among  the  sol- 
diers started  talk  of  a  massacre  to 
avenge  the  extinction  of  the  Manchu 
quarter  in  1911.  Only  the  presence  of 
some  regular  troops  and  the  increasing 
anger  of  the  Japanese  at  the  slaughter 
of  three  of  their  nationals  and  the  loot- 
ing of  all  the  Japanese  shops,  brought 
this  avenging  army  to  a  halt. 

I  do  not  mean  to  give  the  impression 


22     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

that  Northern  soldiers  as  a  whole  are 
anything  like  the  half-savage  mercena- 
ries which  Chang  Hsun  brought  down 
to  the  sack  of  Nanking.  They,  too, 
have  learned  something  from  the  Revo- 
lution. They  have  shaved  off  their 
queues  with  the  rest  of  the  official  classes 
of  Peking  and  the  Northern  towns. 
The  national  spirit  is  witnessed  to  them 
in  the  Government  so  ably  consohdated 
and  centralized  under  Yuan  Shih-k'ai, 
and  they  have  a  loyalty  to  a  Chinese 
government  which  they  never  wholly 
held  for  the  degenerate  IVIanchus.  On 
the  whole,  they  are  long-limbed,  clean- 
living  men  who  could  give  a  splendid 
account  of  themselves  and  their  awak- 
ening nation  in  the  desperate  conflict 
which  may  come  at  no  distant  day  with 
Japan.  In  such  a  war  the  men  who 
fought  each  other  so  gallantly  at  Han- 
kow would  fight  side  by  side  for  a  na- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHIXA     23 

tional  cause  in  which  the  whole  country 
would  be  prepared  to  spend  its  last 
ounce  of  strength.  When  the  Japa- 
nese fleet  appeared  before  Canton  in 
'95,  the  Cantonese  governor  made  the 
characteristic  reply  to  their  challenge  to 
battle  that  the  Peking  government  had 
got  them  into  the  war,  and  the  Peking 
government  could  get  them  out.  The 
sentiment  of  Canton  to-day,  and  of  the 
whole  Republican  South,  is  best  ex- 
pressed in  the  words  of  Liang  Chi- 
ch'iao,  the  dean  of  Cantonese  reformers, 
uttered  during  the  Japanese  crisis  of 
last  spring  when  he  was  JNlinister  of  Jus- 
tice. It  was  the  Republican  spirit  that 
spoke  when  he  said;  "Better  be  shat- 
tered, and  be  shattered  as  a  piece  of 
jade,  than  be  preserved  whole  as  a  com- 
mon brick  tile !"  In  no  language  could 
"Death  before  dishonor"  be  more  de- 
fiantly expressed. 


24     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

The  political  career  of  the  Chinese 
Republic,  while  there  was  a  real  repub- 
lic, was  quite  as  splendid  and  entireh" 
as  unsuccessful  as  its  military  career. 
It  was  a  series  of  inspirations,  impro- 
vised upon  a  complete  but  tremendously 
vital  confusion  of  ideas.  The  first  and 
most  remarkable  inspiration  of  all  was 
the  Republic  itself.  It  amazed  no 
one  more  completely  than  the  little  band 
of  "experts"  on  whom  we  depend  for 
most  of  our  loiowledge  about  China. 
Not  being  able  to  imagine  it,  they  ut- 
terly refused  to  believe  it ;  and  for  weeks 
after  the  Republicans  were  actually  in 
control  of  more  than  half  of  the  nation, 
the  leading  foreign  newspaper  in  China 
was  referring  in  its  headlines  to  "the 
Revolt  in  Hupeh." 

The  clue  to  the  Repubhc  is  that  it  was 
an  imaginative  inspiration.  A  consti- 
tutional monarchy  would  have  left  the 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     25 

people  cold.  A  Chinese  emperor  would 
only  have  been  another  dynasty.  But 
a  people's  government  required  the 
coining  of  a  new  word;  and  out  of  the 
same  mint  there  poured  a  flood  of 
strange  and  inspiring  ideas.  The  Chi- 
nese people  may  be  an  enormous  and  a 
sluggish  and  an  illiterate  people,  but 
there  were  very  few  of  them  living  near 
any  of  the  centers  of  population  who 
did  not  hear  of  and  were  not  stirred  by 
the  passing  of  the  IManchus  and  the  dra- 
matic substitution  of  a  Republic  of  the 
Chinese  people.  Fanned  by  vast  num- 
bers of  pamphlets,  the  text-books  of 
revolutions  in  all  ages,  excited  by  thou- 
sands of  newspapers  which  sprang  up 
almost  over  night,  the  people  reacted  to 
the  new  regime  with  a  vitality  which 
the  Republicans  themselves  never  con- 
trolled and  only  imperfectly  understood. 
Students  and  idealists  that  they  were. 


26     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

however,  they  realized  that  the  current 
of  revolution  which  swept  into  their 
hands  during  October  and  November  of 
1911  every  large  city  and  every  provin- 
cial government  south  of  the  Yang-tse 
River,  as  well  as  most  of  the  larger  cities 
in  the  apathetic  and  conservative  North, 
was  an  impressive  testimony  of  popular 
support.  And  thej^  grasped  the  oppor- 
tunities of  their  time  with  an  imagina- 
tive fervor  which  held  the  attention  of 
the  nation  and  of  the  world  at  large 
wholly  spellbound. 

Three  successive  provisional  parha- 
ments  met  at  Hankow,  Shanghai,  and 
Nanking  respectively  within  the  space 
of  four  months.  And  before  the  last 
one.  Sun  Yat-sen,  the  man  who  had 
been  an  exile  for  more  than  fifteen 
years,  who  had  gathered  up  the  strands 
and  who  had  filled  the  purse  of  the  Chi- 
nese Revolution  in  every  country  in  the 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     27 

world,  who  had  been  summoned  around 
tlie  world  from  London  to  the  prema- 
ture realization  of  his  dreams — this 
man,  a  self-styled  Socialist,  a  Christian, 
a  man  from  the  lowest  ranks  of  the  peo- 
ple, was  inaugurated  as  the  first  presi- 
dent of  the  Chinese  Republic.  It  was 
not  statesmanship.  It  was  supreme 
"bluff";  or,  in  other  words,  it  satisfied 
to  the  highest  degree  the  imaginative 
possibilities  of  the  situation,  as  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai,  the  government  official,  has 
never  satisfied  them  and  never  can  sat- 
isfy them  with  all  the  ermine  and  gold 
of  his  hoped-for  imperial  state. 

Deeply  imaginative  also  was  the  re- 
nunciation of  Sun  Yat-sen,  an  act 
which  will  always  remain,  as  the  Lon- 
don "Times"  cordially  greeted  it,  as  one 
of  the  most  whole-hearted  instances  of 
altruism  in  history.  His  procession 
to     the     ancient     JMing     tombs,     the 


28     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

resting  place  just  outside  Nanking  of 
the  last  dynasty  of  Chinese  emperors, 
stirred  deeply  the  history-loving  Chi- 
nese with  the  immense  moment  of  the 
restoration  of  Chinese  government, 
after  a  space  of  more  than  two  hundred 
years,  again  into  the  hands  of  the  Chi- 
nese people. 

This  is  the  quality  of  mind  which 
brought  about  the  Chinese  Revolution, 
which  created  the  atmosphere  in  which 
thousands  of  young  Chinese  were  eager 
to  give  up  their  hves  for  as  worthy  an 
ideal  as  that  for  which  any  soldier  is 
fighting  to-day  on  the  battlefields  of 
Europe.  Patriotism,  nationalism,  call 
it  what  you  will — it  is  witli  us  a  potent 
delusion  to  evil  as  well  as  an  inspiration 
to  the  good — ^with  the  Chinese  it  is  the 
one  fundamental  contribution  of  the 
Republic  which  no  subsequent  history, 
however  humiliating  to  the   Republi- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     29 

canSj  can  make  less  significant  or  splen- 
did to  the  Chinese  people. 

There  is  no  need  to  trace  their  fail- 
ure through  one  inept,  unsound  judg- 
ment after  another  to  the  hardly  unde- 
serv^ed  humiliation  to  which  their  utter 
confusion  of  ideas  and  the  complete  con- 
descension they  paid  to  their  danger 
from  their  enemies  have  brought  them. 
The  best  example  of  it,  though  not  the 
most  creditable  to  them,  was  the  under- 
mining and  destruction  of  the  Parlia- 
ment of  1913. 

A  cabinet  crisis  of  the  simimer  before 
had  deprived  the  Southern  party  of  the 
share  it  had  been  ostensibly  granted 
in  the  Peking  administration.  Their 
breach  w^ith  the  President  had  been  wid- 
ening steadily  ever  since,  and  the  advan- 
tage lay  entirely  with  the  President 
tlirough  his  vigilant  control  of  the  treas- 
ury and  the  army.     Against  these,  and 


30     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

against  a  solid  executive  responsible  to 
and  dominated  by  Yuan  Shih-k'ai,  they 
staked  the  influence  of  a  free  parliament 
through  whose  control  they  intended  to 
wrest  the  central  power  from  the  Presi- 
dent and  vest  it  in  themselves.  In  the 
first  popular  elections  China  had  ever 
seen,  they  won  control  of  this  Parlia- 
ment. It  was  an  irregular  and  a  cor- 
rupt election  according  to  ideal  stand- 
ards, but  the  decision  did  satisfactorily 
register,  nevertheless,  the  mind  of  the 
politically  interested  elements  of  the 
Chinese  people. 

The  new  Parliament  assembled  in 
Peking  in  the  spring  of  1913.  But 
even  before  it  assembled,  the  emotions 
of  both  sides  had  been  strained  already 
almost  to  the  breaking  point.  On 
March  20,  Sung  Chiao-jen,  the  most 
brilliant  political  leader  of  the  Southern 
Nationalist  party,  the  Ivuo  Ming  Tang, 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     31 

had  been  shot  and  killed  in  the  Shanghai 
railway  station,  just  as  he  was  waiting 
for  the  night  train  for  Peking.  His 
mission  in  Peking,  the  whole  countr}^ 
knew,  was  to  organize  the  new  Parlia- 
ment into  the  kind  of  political  force 
which  would  make  itself  felt  at  the 
President's  palace;  and  there  is  little 
doubt  now,  taking  into  consideration 
the  direct  evidence  in  the  case  and  the 
broad  probabilities  of  the  situation,  that 
if  Yuan  did  not  actually  instigate  his 
murder,  at  any  rate  he  knew  of  it  and 
gave  it  his  consent. 

The  result  of  his  death  was  profound, 
and  we  know  now  that  bands  of  young 
men  all  over  China  began  making  plans 
at  once  for  the  Second  Revolution  they 
believed  absolutely  inevitable.  Into 
this  already  heavily  charged  atmos- 
phere, there  entered  another  enormous 
point  of  contention  in  the  Six  Power 


32     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Loan.  While  America  withdrew  from 
the  consortium  of  bankers  on  account 
of  the  dependent  position  in  which  they 
were  attempting  to  place  the  Chinese 
people,  the  other  powers  determined  to 
overcome  the  objections  of  Parliament 
by  lending  directly  to  the  President. 
The  transaction  took  place  at  three 
o'clock  in  the  morning  of  April  27,  and 
placed  in  the  hands  of  the  President  the 
administration  of  $125,000,000,  and, 
what  was  much  more  material,  the  firm 
knowledge  that  he  was  the  "best  bet"  of 
the  legations  against  the  parties  of  con- 
stitutional government. 

I  sat  in  the  galleries  for  many  days 
and  watched  the  proceedings  of  the  first 
and  only  Parliament  of  the  Chinese  Re- 
public, which  was  summoned  under  such 
ill-starred  auspices.  Its  failure  was  as- 
sured from  the  beginning,  but  with  the 
characteristic  heedless  idealism  of  the 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     33 

Southern  Republicans,  it  cordially  as- 
sisted in  its  failure  in  almost  every  way 
possible.  It  spent  three  weeks  electing 
a  speaker.  It  devoted  a  score  or  more 
of  sessions  to  the  sole  business  of  asking 
the  President  or  one  of  his  representa- 
tives to  explain  the  "constitutionality" 
of  the  Big  Loan,  and  in  abusing  and  in- 
sulting whoever  was  sent  down  to  make 
the  explanation.  I  have  seen  the  secre- 
tary of  the  august  Senate  telephoning 
to  the  President  that  he  was  expected  to 
come  down  and  give  an  account  of  him- 
self "that  afternoon  and  no  later,"  amid 
the  most  enthusiastic  legislative  cheers. 
Unfortunately,  Yuan  Shih-k'ai's  gout 
was  particularly  bad  that  summer,  and 
he  never  left  the  palace,  even  when  he 
was  impeached  by  a  large  majority  of 
both  houses. 

Deterrents  to  busmess  were  infinite. 
Both  houses  had  passed  an  absurd  rule 


34    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

that  a  quorum  constituted  half  the 
members,  and  the  obstructionists  of  the 
President's  party  used  this  effectually 
to  clear  the  hall  in  the  midst  of  debates, 
and  to  keep  both  bodies  idle  for  days  at 
a  time.  No  legislation  was  passed ;  for 
when  the  inquiries  about  the  loan  ceased, 
the  impeachment-of-the-President  agi- 
tation began.  And  meanwhile  a  large 
committee  was  appointed  to  draft  a 
Constitution.  At  their  first  meeting, 
this  committee  voted  that  the  chairs, 
table,  inkstands,  and  brushes  they  used 
should  be  carefully  guarded  and  pre- 
served for  posterity.  History  must 
ignore  them,  however,  for  within  a 
month  they  were  outlawed  from  Peking. 
Both  houses  were  crowded  with  men 
of  the  greatest  abihty;  but,  like  other 
features  of  the  Chinese  Revolution, 
their  futility  in  results,  hemmed  in  as 
they  were  by  the  ultimate  and  necessary 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     35 

hopelessness  of  their  situation,  cannot 
be  taken  as  a  fair  clue  at  all  to  their 
real  services  to  the  nation.  Their  time 
was  as  brief  as  it  was  hectic.  With  the 
outlawry  of  the  Kuo  JMing  Tang  party 
after  the  tragic  futility  of  the  Second 
Revolution,  Parliament  had  ceased  to 
exist  by  the  time  that  Yuan  was  in- 
augurated permanent  President.  He 
assumed  this  office  on  the  10th  of 
October,  the  second  anniversary  of  the 
Revolution  whose  leaders  he  had  out- 
lawed, and  whose  principles  he  had  so 
patiently  undermined  and  overthrown. 
On  the  Chinese  people,  the  effect  of 
the  failure  of  the  Parliament  of  1913 
was  bewildering;  and  Yuan  Shih-k'ai 
has  had  his  way  since  then  with  highly 
respectable  bodies  appointed  by  himself, 
and  called  by  various  names  of  uniform 
dignity  and  pious  purpose.  But  there 
is  no  heart  in  such  a  government,  and  no 


36     PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA 

popular  enthusiasm  for  it,  save  only  for 
the  brilhant  men  the  President  has  from 
time  to  time  gathered  around  him  in  his 
cabinet.  But  for  its  splendid  defiance 
to  Japan,  the  atmosphere  of  the  present 
regime  is  an  intensely  practical  one. 
The  reaction  is  precisely  what  the  un- 
assimilable  heroics  of  the  revolutionary 
quality  of  mind  have  produced.  It  is 
the  inevitable  swing  of  the  pendulum 
away  from  the  instabihty  of  the  revolu- 
tionary period. 

But  to  admit  that  reaction  is  politi- 
cally supreme  is  not  at  all  to  say  that 
reaction,  even  constructive  reaction,  to- 
day represents  the  fervent  desire  of  any 
large  section  of  the  Chinese  people.  It 
is  insurgency,  bold  experiments  with 
new  ideas,  the  release  of  fresh  energies 
and  unprecedented  ambitions,  which 
still  sum  up  the  underlying  mood  of 
present-day     China.     To     understand 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     37 

this  we  have  only  to  turn  to  some  of 
these  insurgencies  themselves,  to  touch 
sjTiipathetically  the  changing  life  of  the 
Chinese  people.  The  substance  of  the 
change  is  shadowy.  But  that  its  in- 
spiration is  vivid  and  profound  in  a 
manner  wholty  beyond  the  powers  of 
mere  political  fluctuations  will,  I  hope, 
be  made  clear  in  the  chapters  w^hich  fol- 
low. 


II 

THE   WOMAN^S   PART 

THE  Chinese  Revolution  struck 
many  chords  in  the  American 
heart  of  generous  and  romantic  sym- 
pathy. It  was  the  more  stirring 
because  it  was  so  completely  unex- 
pected; and  in  some  respects  it  was  not 
only  unexpected  but  almost  incon- 
ceivable. Such  above  all  was  the  part 
taken  in  it  by  women.  The  history  of 
what  women  did  in  the  Chinese  Revolu- 
tion has  never  been  written,  and  by 
most  foreigners  it  has  never  even  been 
imagined.  We  heard,  for  instance,  of 
"regiments"  of  Chinese  women  getting 
measured  for  men's  uniforms  and  going 
up  to  fight  at  Nanking  and  Hankow. 

38 


PRESENT-DAY  CHIXA     39 

We  heard  of  turbulent  crowds  of  women 
in  enthusiastic  meetings  flinging  their 
jewelry  on  the  platform  for  the  war 
chest  of  the  revolutionary  cause;  we 
heard  of  women  bomb  throwers,  of 
women  spies,  of  women  members  of  the 
"Dare  to  Die"  corps,  and  of  a  dozen 
other  picturesque  and  spirited  activities 
with  which  women  contributed  a  new 
and  spontaneous  energy  to  Chinese  life 
during  1911  and  1912. 

But  of  the  leadership  which  gave 
these  things  an  interpretive  relation  to 
the  Chinese  people  as  a  whole,  we  did 
not  then  have,  and  we  hardly  now  have, 
any  direct  information  at  all.  There 
was  such  a  leadership,  created  in  in- 
dividual women,  and  in  groups  of 
women  by  the  vivid  and  infectious  at- 
mosphere of  the  time.  But  it  was  so 
perfectly  spontaneous  on  the  part  of  the 
women  who  responded  to  it,  and  its  ef- 


40     PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA 

fects  were  so  obscured  by  the  broader 
strokes  of  the  political  revolution  that 
we  have  never  identified  them  sym- 
pathetically through  names  or  person- 
alities. They  are  well  worth  a  better 
acquaintance. 

Let  me  tell  you,  for  instance,  of  Dr. 
ISIary  Chang,  a  little  Chinese  doctor 
from  Canton,  who  met  one  of  the  emer- 
gencies of  the  Revolution  with  a  spirit 
that  was  wholly  typical  of  the  time. 
When  the  Revolution  broke  out  Dr. 
Chang  was  attached  to  the  Chinese  hos- 
pital in  Shanghai.  Like  all  the  revolu- 
tionists, she  was  caught  unawares  by 
the  accidental  bomb  explosion  in  Han- 
kow, on  the  9th  of  October,  which  pre- 
maturely gave  away  the  Southern  plans 
and  committed  the  conspirators  to  the 
necessity  of  making  their  fight  then  or 
being  extinguished  by  the  now  alert 
and  thoroughly  informed  Government. 


PRESENT-DAY  CHIXA     41 

The  Red  Cross  belonged  to  the  Govern- 
ment, and  her  appHcation  to  their  head- 
quarters in  Shanghai  was  met  by  the 
natural  pretense,  so  dear  to  the  Chinese 
heart,  that  there  was  "no  trouble,"  ex- 
cept such  as  she  might  help  to  make. 
Thus  challenged,  she  proceeded  to  make 
some  trouble.  She  called  a  meeting  of 
the  women  in  Shanghai  who  would  vol- 
unteer to  go  to  the  front  at  once  as  Red 
Cross  nurses.  The  meeting  was  called 
at  a  day's  notice,  yet  almost  one  hun- 
di-ed  women  attended  it.  They  in- 
cluded her  own  small  staff  of  nurses, 
some  women  medical  students,  and  a 
group  of  other  girls  and  women  mainly 
from  the  mission  schools,  who  appeared 
spontaneously  like  the  "unnamed  ones" 
of  the  French  Revolution  in  answer  to 
the  national  emergency.  A  day  passed 
after  the  meeting  and  on  the  next  morn- 
ing a  group  of  between  thirty  and  forty 


42    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

nurses  were  ready.  Uniformed,  after 
a  fashion,  and  equipped  with  surgical 
instruments,  bandages,  medical  stores 
and  such  other  necessities  as  could  be 
hastily  gathered,  they  started  for  wher- 
ever the  battlefields  might  be.  Unfor- 
tunately, they  forgot  food,  and  for  al- 
most thirty-six  hours  after  arriving  near 
Hankow  they  lived  on  cake,  which  was 
all  that  was  left  in  one  of  the  for- 
eign missions  near  the  city,  and  a  little 
tea. 

But  although  they  did  not  find  food, 
they  found  work  in  plenty.  The  regu- 
lar soldiers  from  the  North,  although 
outnumbered  in  the  early  days,  shot 
much  straighter  and  did  much  more  ex- 
ecution than  did  the  untrained  and  un- 
disciplined Southerners.  Serious  cas- 
uahties  ran  at  times  into  hundreds  every 
day,  and  although  there  was  foreign  as- 
sistance, notably  the  surgeon  and  his 


MISS   TANG  CHUN-YING 
President    of    tlie    "Cliinese    Suffragette    Societv,"    small    in 
numbers    but    in    purposes    much    of    what    its    name    implies. 
Taken  in  Peking    winter   costume 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     43 

helpers  from  a  Russian  gunboat  sta- 
tioned at  Hankow,  the  work  actually 
upon  the  battlefields  had  to  be  done  by 
this  little  band  of  volunteers,  as  un- 
trained and  as  poorly  equipped  in  their 
way  as  the  soldiers  to  whom  they  were 
administering.  They  rode  on  little 
ponies  about  the  country  from  one  shift- 
ing battlefield  to  another,  performing 
not  only  first-aid,  but  serious  oper- 
ations of  all  kinds  on  desperately 
wounded  men.  With  the  crude  and 
meager  kit  she  carried  slung  over  her 
pony  Dr.  Chang  alone  performed  over 
one  hundred  amputations  in  the  three 
days  around  the  battle  of  Kilometer 
Ten.  Several  of  her  nurses  were 
wounded;  and  they  were  all  badly 
scared.  But  none  of  them  deserted. 
They  stuck  to  their  work  through  the 
desperate  days  of  their  cause,  through 
defeat,      through      humiliation,      and 


44     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

through  the  burning  of  the  city  of 
Hankow  by  the  Northerners,  which  al- 
most amounted  to  a  massacre.  They 
showed  the  world  as  nobly  as  any  of 
their  soldier-comrades  the  true  quality  . 
of  Chinese  fighting  courage. 

I  met  Dr.  Chang  when  I  was  in 
Shanghai  just  two  years  after  this  all 
happened.  She  was  then  in  charge  of 
the  Shanghai  Chinese  Hospital  just  off 
the  Bund  of  the  Chinese  city  of  Shang- 
hai. It  was  at  the  time  when  the  rev- 
olutionary parties  were  facing  the 
political  crisis  which  led  to  their  des- 
perate stand  in  the  Second  Revolution 
and  subsequently  to  the  expulsion  of 
most  of  the  revolutionary  element  from 
the  country.  Things  were  not  settled. 
Her  little  hospital  had  been  running  for 
five  years  on  funds  which  were  always 
precarious  but  which  then  were  dwin- 
dling before  the  rising  tide  of  the  com- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     45 

ing  reaction.  Yet  her  experience  in  the 
ardent  period  of  revolutionary  hope  and 
enthusiasm  was  as  fresh  to  her  as  if  it 
had  been  yesterday.  She  told  of  it  in 
short,  ejaculatory  sentences,  sentences 
that  were  like  herself  riding  on  her  lit- 
tle, Mongolian  pony  across  the  battle- 
fields. 

"Never  had  I  heard  guns  before  that 
time,"  she  said,  "yet  we  were  the  only 
ones  who  could  go  help — and  we  go." 
(Her  English,  in  spite  of  her  long  train- 
ing in  mission  school  and  medical  col- 
lege, was  still  quaint  and  fragmentary. ) 
"Oh,  we  were  so  angry,"  she  went  on, 
"because  the  Red  Cross  in  Shanghai 
say,  'Those  men  you  call  rebels  only 
thieves  and  robbers — bad  men — they 
will  not  be  grateful.'  But  we  know. 
They  were  our  brothers,  our  patriots, 
our  heroes.  We  must  go  help.  But 
aij  such  terrible  things  I  never  have 


46     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

seen.  I  have  no  rubber  gloves  with  me, 
yet  many  times  we  find  wounds  left  two, 
three  days :  I  must  cut  away — you  know 
— terrible  things.  If  I  have  one  small 
cut  on  my  littlest  finger,  nothing  would 
save  me.  I  do  not  have ;  you  see,  here 
I  am  still." 

I  wish  I  could  begin  to  put  her  vivac- 
ity into  this  picture,  especially  her  rest- 
less slits  of  flashing  eyes,  and  the  ges- 
tures that  began  at  her  elbows  and  shook 
down  to  the  tips  of  her  fingers.  "Every 
time  I  make  an  operation,"  she  said, 
"I  must  make  my  courage  strong  again. 
But  never  was  I  so  happy.  I  start  new 
society — White  Heart  Society — be- 
cause they  would  not  let  me  be  Red 
Cross.  And  the  soldiers  call  me  Miss 
White  Heart.  And  all  of  them  when 
they  come  to  the  hospital  and  begin  to 
get  better  make  me  stand  in  the  middle 
and  take  picture  of  all  their  wounded 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     47 

bodies — you  see? — some  of  them  have 
arm  or  leg  gone,  some  worse,  but  all  of 
them,  they  smile.  They  know  they 
fight  for  China.  And  when  such  men 
have  fought  together  for  our  country — 
coolies,  students,  old  men,  young  men, 
men  of  all  the  provinces — that  was  one 
thing  that  make  our  revolution  great  to 
see." 

Dr.  Chang  was  a  Christian ;  not  only 
that,  but  as  sincere  a  Christian  as  she 
was  a  patriot.  She  said,  for  instance, 
"I  think  God  help  me  very  much,"  so 
unaffectedly  and  with  such  gentle 
dignity  that  I  can  only  think  now  of  the 
nursing  sisters  in  Europe  as  saying  it 
with  more  perfect  grace  and  under- 
standing. 

When  I  came  to  go,  this  spirited  little 
pioneer  insisted  on  driving  me  to  my 
next  destination  in  her  little  pony-trap, 
an  outfit  perfectly  suitable  to  her  per- 


48    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

sonality,  but  which  defied  all  the  con- 
ventions of  Shanghai,  past  and  present. 
That  was  my  last  view  of  her,  sitting 
erect,  crying  "Hi!  Hi!"  to  clear  a  pas- 
sage through  the  tangled,  staring  traf- 
fic of  Szechuen  Road,  but  oblivious  to 
it  all  as  she  was  erect  above  it.  And  so 
she  passed,  and  not  since  then  have  I 
picked  out  again  the  course  of  her  cour- 
ageous, consecrated  life,  a  life  that  has 
always  seemed  to  me  the  most  perfect 
glimpse  I  have  ever  seen  of  the  future  of 
Chinese  womanhood. 

My  destination  that  day  was  to  call 
on  Miss  Sophia  Chang,  a  girl  whose 
Anglicized  name  came,  not  as  with  the 
little  doctor  from  Canton,  from  Chris- 
tian teaching,  but  from  an  inspiration  at 
the  opposite  pole  of  the  world's  cul- 
ture— from  the  Russian  Revolution. 
Miss  Sophia  Chang  was  a  political  rev- 
olutionist.    She  took  her  name  from  a 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     49 

brave  Russian  girl  whom  she  had  read 
of  in  her  student  days  in  Japan ;  and  she 
told  me  in  halting  English  but  with 
glowing  eyes,  of  the  story  of  her  hero- 
ine's friend,  Marie  Spiridonova.  Miss 
Chang  was  from  Hunan,  where  the  peo- 
ple are  not  small  and  wiry,  like  the 
Cantonese,  but  large  and  grave,  like  the 
Germans  or  Russians.  She  was  one  of 
the  original  members  of  Sun  Yat-sen's 
Revolutionary  Nationalist  party,  the 
Tung  Meng  Hwei,  and  was  the  prin- 
cipal, and  for  much  of  the  time,  the  only 
woman  member  on  the  secret  committee 
that  managed  the  conspiratorial  part  of 
the  Revolution. 

It  was  she  who  raised  ten  thousand 
dollars  from  the  women  of  Shanghai 
in  the  days  when  ready  money  was  so 
badly  needed  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Revolution.  It  was  she  who  organized 
the    meetings    at    which    hundreds    of 


50     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

women  poured  their  jewels  on  the  plat- 
form for  the  Republican  cause;  jewels 
which  were  not  mere  useless  trinkets, 
but  after  the  thrifty  manner  of  the 
Chinese,  represented  through  long  cus- 
tom the  convertible  savings,  the  cur- 
rency of  womankind.  Beside  these 
memorable  meetings  she  had  workers 
collecting  in  the  streets  and  from  door 
to  door,  and  organized  benefit  perform- 
ances in  which  local  actors  gave  their 
services  free  to  attract  the  theater-lov- 
ing Chinese.  Among  the  characteristic 
performance  given  at  this  time  was  a 
cycle  of  the  Three  Revolutions,  includ- 
ing "George  Washington,  or  the 
American  Revolution,"  "The  French 
Revolution  and  the  Life  of  Napoleon," 
and  the  climax  of  the  three,  "The 
Heroes  of  the  Chinese  Revolution."  A 
troupe  of  women  actors  in  a  special 
theater  of  their  own  was  also  formed — 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     51 

in  whic'i  no  man  was  allowed  behind  the 
scenes. 

When  I  visited  her.  Miss  Chang  was 
directing  a  school  for  girls  and  women 
in  the  Hongkew  district  of  Shanghai,  a 
school  which  had  been  literally  or- 
ganized out  of  the  enthusiasm  of  the 
Revolution.  The  money,  that  is,  had 
come  in  much  the  same  way  as  the 
money  had  come  to  support  the  Revolu- 
tion— through  patriotism  and  self- 
sacrifice  and  the  vision  of  things  to 
come.  Among  the  teachers  was  one 
who  was  refreshing  her  mind  with 
Chinese  again  after  a  twenty-five-year 
lifetime  in  California,  her  natural  lan- 
guage being  the  English  with  a  strong 
and  rather  slangy  American  accent 
that  she  had  come  to  speak,  in  spite  of 
the  faculty,  at  the  University  of  Cah- 
fornia. 

Among  the  subjects  on  the  curric- 


52     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

ulum  at  this  school,  which  had  some- 
thing over  three  hundred  students  of 
all  ages,  were  English,  syntax  and  liter- 
ature, Chinese  chirography,  reading  in 
the  Chinese  classics,  elementary  courses 
in  law  and  medicine,  teaching,  and  his- 
tory. Connected  with  the  school  was 
also  an  organization  which  bore  the 
formidable  name  of  the  Chinese  Wom- 
en's Cooperative  Association.  At  the 
small  shop  which  was  the  most  palpable 
reason  for  this  organization's  being  was 
offered  for  sale  one  article  of  a  strik- 
ingly revolutionary  character.  It  was 
a  hat,  an  object  of  use  and  adornment 
which  the  custom  of  staying  in-doors  has 
denied  to  Chinese  women  since  the  be- 
ginning of  time.  It  was  a  small,  round, 
pill-box  of  a  hat;  and  though  I  ad- 
mired it  with  all  the  fervor  of  one  who 
appreciated  its  radical  meaning,  I 
must  confess  that  esthetically,  beside 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     53 

the  dignified  and  glossily  complicated 
coiffure  of  in-doors  Chinese  woman- 
hood, it  left  much  to  be  desired. 

]Miss  Chang  was  a  typical  Chinese 
girl  of  the  middle  classes,  not  a  Chris- 
tian, not  under  any  foreign  influence, 
indeed  known  to  very  few  foreigners, 
missionaries  or  otherwise,  throughout 
the  city.  Perhaps  the  only  other  curi- 
ous foreigner  w^ho  had  come  visiting  her 
before  was  Mrs.  Carrie  Chapman  Catt, 
the  suffrage  leader,  who  found  her 
through  purely  Chinese  introduction 
when  on  her  world- tour  in  1912.  In 
the  monthly  magazine,  a  very  interest- 
ing periodical  issued  by  the  Coopera- 
tive Society  under  ]Miss  Chang's  editor- 
ship, Mrs.  Catt's  views  and  some  of  her 
articles  were  very  liberally  translated. 
That  was  the  only  connection  I  found 
in  this  typical  revolutionary  Chinese 
women's  society  with  the  supposedly  in-  _ 


54     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

terested  foreign  outside  world.  It  is  a 
characteristic  instance  of  the  isolation  of 
the  Chinese  women's  movement  in  gen- 
eral. Not  only  are  most  of  the  leaders 
quite  typical  Chinese  women,  rarely 
speaking  a  foreign  language,  except 
possibly  Japanese,  but  the  thought,  the 
moving  idea,  is  wholly  natural  to  their 
own  spontaneous  conclusions,  evolved 
through  their  own  awakening  self- 
consciousness. 

I  found  this  never  more  conclusively 
proved  than  on  a  visit  to  the  leader  of  a 
society  in  Peking  which  bore  the  ad- 
venturous name  of  the  "Chinese  Suf- 
fragette Society."  Miss  Tang  Chiin- 
ying,  the  president  of  this  societ)'^,  could 
not  speak  a  word  of  English  and  knew 
no  missionaries  or  foreigners  whatso- 
ever— except  the  ubiquitous  Mrs.  Catt. 
It  was  an  astonishing  society  to  any 
one  who  still  believes  in  the  unchange- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA    55 

ableness  of  China,  because  in  its  mem- 
bership and  outlook,  except  for  a  small 
admixture  of  Japanese  radicalism,  it  is 
wholly  and  characteristically  Chinese. 
Miss  Tang  had  been  a  student  in 
Japan  and  a  hardy  pioneer  and  agitator 
for  women's  reform  for  more  than  ten 
years  before  the  Revolution.  The 
Chinese  Suffragette  Society  was  a 
comparatively  new  enterprise,  chiefly 
founded  on  an  intense  interest  aroused 
among  the  women  revolutionists  around 
Miss  Tang  in  the  English  militant  suf- 
frage movement.  While  in  Peking  I 
visited  a  nmnber  of  schools  that  had 
been  organized  voluntarily  and  were  be- 
ing taught  by  girls  from  this  society; 
and  the  first  question  invariably  was, 
"Tell  us  about  the  suffragettes  of  Eng- 
land." One  I  remember  in  particular, 
where  a  very  small  woman  in  tight 
silk  trousers  who  might  have  stepped 


5Q     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

straight  out  of  some  Chinese  comic 
opera — that  is,  one  of  our  Chinese  comic 
operas — asked  me  questions  about  mili- 
tancy and  hunger  strikes,  and  proces- 
sions, and  firing  letter  boxes  and  other 
precise  points  innumerable.  She  was 
in  charge  of  a  "law  school,"  and  her  ad- 
venturousness  of  mind  was  all  the  more 
apparent  in  contrast  to  her  tiny  feet, 
bound  and  squeezed  in  her  defenseless 
childhood  into  a  merciless  conformity 
her  mind  had  since  outgrown.  Even 
the  Boxers  could  not  have  denied  that 
in  all  respects,  except  her  inquiring 
mind,  she  was  a  typical  Chinese  woman. 
It  was  this  young  lady  who  explained 
to  me  the  society's  constitution.  The 
constitution  of  the  Chinese  Suffragette 
Society  was  impressive.  It  included 
ten  points  to  work  for:  the  education 
of  women,  the  abolition  of  foot-binding, 
the  prohibition  of  concubinage  and  its 


PRESENT-DAY  CHIXA     57 

result  in  making  marriage  a  polyga- 
mous institution,  the  forbidding  of 
child  marriages,  reform  in  the  condi- 
tion of  prostitutes,  social  service  to 
women  in  industry,  the  encouragment 
of  modesty  in  dress,  better  terms  of 
marriage  for  the  sexes,  leading  toward 
marriages  for  love,  the  establishment  of 
political  rights,  and  the  elevation  of  the 
position  of  women  in  the  family  and  the 
home.  To  support  these  contentions 
Miss  Tang  started  two  interesting 
papers,  one  written  in  the  language  of 
the  educated  classes,  and  the  other  in 
the  simpler  vernacular  of  the  people. 
AVhen  I  was  in  Peking  both  of  these 
periodicals  were  still  running,  though 
they  were  issued  monthly  instead  of,  as 
at  first,  weekly.  They  contained  a 
digest  of  news  of  the  movements  of 
women  abroad  that  was  based  on  ex- 
tremely wide  reading ;  not  only  that,  but 


58     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

the  poems  and  articles  which  were 
prodigally  scattered  through  their  pages 
were  of  a  very  uncommon  literary  skill 
indeed. 

These  were  almost  entirely  from  the 
pen  of  Miss  Tang  herself ;  and  certainly 
her  personality  was  of  the  type  that 
could  freshen  every  page  on  which  she 
wrote.  It  was  she  who  introduced  to 
China  the  spectacle  of  a  body  of  women 
demanding  the  vote  from  the  national 
legislature  at  Nanking.  There  were 
stories  that  back  in  her  home  province 
of  Hunan  she  broke  up  a  newspaper  of- 
fice single-handed  whence  had  issued 
slanders  against  her  good  name.  She 
was  a  frequent  and  vigorous  platform 
speaker  in  Peking  and  Tientsin.  When 
the  Second  Revolution  broke  out,  she 
went  at  once  to  the  center  of  the  plotting 
at  Hankow,  was  arrested,  and  for 
months  the  report  was  spread  abroad 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     59 

that  she  had  been  secretly  executed. 
Later  she  turned  up  in  Shanghai,  how- 
ever, and  then  in  Japan,  where  I  beheve 
she  is  now.  Every  Chinese  revolution- 
ist knows  of  her,  though  they  do  not  all, 
I  add  in  fairness,  approve  of  her.  But 
she  has  come  as  near,  I  believe,  as  the 
Revolution  has  allowed  any  Chinese 
woman  to  become  a  national  figure. 

Diametrically  different  in  all  her 
temperament  to  this  fiery  advocate  of 
women's  rights  is  Dr.  Yamei  Kin,  the 
distinguished  woman  physician  and 
protegee  of  President  Yuan  Shih-k'ai, 
who  has  several  times  visited  the  United 
States.  Dr.  Kin  is  a  conservative; 
though  she  is  a  born  Cantonese  she  is 
a  firm  partizan  of  the  Xorth.  I  found 
in  her  splendidly  equipped  IMunicipal 
Hospital  and  School  for  Xurses  in 
Tientsin  a  genius  of  organization  and 
vigorous    initiative    that    was    wholly 


60     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

worthy  of  the  first  women's  hospital  in 
China,  apart  from  mission  work,  to  be 
entirely  under  the  supervision  and  con- 
trol of  a  Chinese  woman. 

I  found  Dr.  Kin,  for  all  her  conserv- 
atism, acutely  conscious  of  her  people 
and  their  needs.  She,  too,  though  she 
was  on  close  terms  of  intimacy  with  the 
missionaries,  was  not  a  Christian.  Her 
visits  abroad  had  taught  her  the  value 
of  aphorisms  when  being  interviewed. 
"China  should  have  kept  the  dragon 
flag,"  she  said,  for  instance;  "for  China, 
like  the  dragon  of  mythology,  is  a  coun- 
try which  does  not  grow  gradually,  but 
suddenly  sheds  its  old  skin  for  a  new 
one."  Also,  I  remember  this  one,  which 
I  did  not  like  so  well.  "The  Northern- 
ers are  the  real  Chinese;  the  stalwart, 
honest,  trustworthy  part  of  our  people. 
Although  I  am  a  Southerner  I  feel  that 
the  Southern  people  are  what  you  think 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     61 

of  when  you  think  of  the  crafty,  cunning 
Oriental." 

At.  Dr.  Kin's  hospital — it  was  in  the 
humid,  germ-breeding  summer  when  I 
saw  it — she  was  caring  for  between  one 
hundred  and  fifty  and  two  hundred 
women  a  day;  and  the  crowds  of  patient 
little  women  of  all  kinds  and  classes 
who  were  waiting  so  unobtrusively 
about  the  broad  flagstones  of  her  big 
inner  courtyard  gave  eloquent  evidence 
of  the  unique  social  service  of  this  in- 
stitution to  the  city  of  over  a  million 
it  served  alone.  It  was  a  splendid  niche 
to  be  filling,  a  potently  practical  part  to 
be  playing  in  that  constantly  widening 
experience  of  her  sex  and  her  people, 
which,  in  the  last  analysis,  can  only  be 
learned  by  doing. 

Behind  these  women,  the  leaders,  the 
pioneers,  you  can  conceive  of  countless 
others,  dreaming,  understanding,   and 


G2     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

achieving  a  new  set  of  experiences  for 
the  Chinese  race.  A  Chinese  girl  can 
now  become  a  teacher  or  a  nurse  al- 
most without  restriction,  and  she  can 
aspire  to  be  a  Government  student 
abroad,  or  a  doctor,  an  editor,  a  civil 
servant,  or  even  a  social  reformer  at 
home.  The  invasion  of  social  life  in 
general,  the  increasing  number  of  wom- 
en's papers,  not  all  of  which  have  been 
snuffed  out  in  the  reaction,  the  vast  in- 
crease of  girl  students,  and  the  pro- 
foundly changing  relation  of  women  to 
the  home,  are  all  deeply  significant. 

One  should  never  lose  sight,  however, 
of  the  characteristic  Chinese  strain 
which  makes  this  movement  like  nothing 
else  in  the  world. 

The  invasion  in  social  life  most  notice- 
able in  Japan  for  instance,  is  the  flood 
of  girls  who  in  recent  years  have  en- 
tered the  world  of  business.     In  China 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     63 

this  phenomenon  is  completely  absent, 
and  shows  no  signs  of  developing  for 
years  to  come.  Miss  C.  R.  Soong,  Dr. 
Sun's  charming  secretary,  claimed  to 
be  the  only  woman  in  China  who  worked 
in  a  man's  office,  and  unless  other  cases 
of  purely  "patriotic"  employment  fur- 
nish hke  exceptions,  her  claim  was  liter- 
ally true.  There  are  no  Chinese 
typists,  no  Chinese  shopgirls,  no  Chinese 
ticket  takers,  not  any  women  at  all,  ex- 
cept Eurasian  and  foreign  girls,  in  the 
endless  business  employments  that  they 
occupy  in  the  Western  and  the  Japa- 
nese worlds.  The  up-to-date  Y.  W. 
C.  A.  trains  many  capable  stenogra- 
phers and  typists;  but  for  employment 
under  women  only,  as  in  mission  schools, 
hospitals,  and  purely  private  office 
work.  This  taboo  against  women's  em- 
ployment is  even  supported  by  Young 
China;  for  the  revolution  is  primarily 


64     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

one  of  mind,  and  the  new  opportunities 
it  stresses  for  women  are  distinctly  men- 
tal opportunities. 

A  more  material  revolution,  however, 
has  introduced  Chinese  women  of  the 
lowest  classes  to  factory  labor.  The 
cotton  mills  of  Shanghai  alone  employ 
25,000  women  and  young  girls  twelve 
hours  day  and  night,  with  a  sixteen- 
hour  day  on  Saturdays,  for  wages  that 
average  twelve  to  fifteen  cents  a  day. 
The  middle  classes  can  enforce  their 
boycott  on  the  business  world;  but 
modern  industry  is  catching  the  women 
of  the  poor  in  the  gigantic  net  of  eco- 
nomic evolution.  Factories  run  by 
woman  and  child  labor  pay  57  per  cent, 
annual  profit  in  Shanghai,  and  by  that 
door  Western  industrialism  is  entering 
more  rapidly  every  year  into  the  lives 
of  the  women  of  China.  As  yet  there 
are  no  laws,   either   against   the   for- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     65 

eigner,  who  is  mainly  responsible  for 
these  things,  or  for  the  Chinese,  who  are 
so  far  merely  their  minor  competitors. 
There  are  no  laws,  no  statistics,  and 
hardly  any  general  knowledge  or  con- 
sideration. 

Now  in  this  stratum  of  the  national 
life,  now  in  that,  the  pervasive  hand 
of  evolution  ceaselessly  continues  in  its 
enduring  work  of  alteration  in  the 
status  of  women.  This  revolution  has 
been  no  mere  ephemeral  effervescence 
of  the  coast  cities;  it  has  penetrated  to 
the  ultimate  hearthstone  of  the  people 
on  whom  all  Chinese  civilization  rests — 
the  countless  millions  of  the  peasantry. 
It  has  reached  them  because  it  possesses 
the  only  quality  in  the  world  that  could 
reach  them:  it  is  above  all  a  moral  rev- 
olution. Consider  the  three  great  re- 
forms in  Chinese  home  life  that  have 
accompanied  it — the  crusades   against 


66     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

the  opium  traffic,  against  foot  binding, 
and  against  child  slavery;  one  charter 
of  freedom  each  for  the  man,  the 
woman,  and  the  child,  but  all  three 
supremely  the  concern  of  women  as 
keepers  and  conservers  of  the  home. 
How  terribly  far  from  completion  all 
these  reforms  are  only  those  know  who 
have  seen  the  degradation  and  compel- 
ling poverty  at  fii'st  hand  of  the  life  of 
the  mass  of  the  Chinese  people.  But 
this  much  is  certain:  that  the  spirit  of 
these  reforms  and  the  quality  of  mind 
of  the  Revolution,  have  got  home  to  the 
common  people  in  a  way,  be  it  ever  so 
little,  that  will  inevitably  tend  steadil}'- 
to  raise  the  lot  of  women  in  years  to 
come.  They  have  created  something 
more  nearly  like  a  national  renaissance 
in  the  moral  fiber  of  the  people  than  any 
other  period  of  social  reform  recorded 
about  China. 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     67 

Like  the  woman  movement  all  over 
the  world,  the  emergence  of  women  in 
China  is  above  everything  a  spirit  of 
humanism,  a  regeneration  of  enduring 
instincts  for  good  in  both  sexes,  and  a 
widening  of  that  area  of  contact  and 
understanding  between  men  and  women 
which  inexorably  grows  with  civiliza- 
tion. In  their  capacity  for  progress 
there  are,  I  believe,  no  women  in  Asia 
like  the  women  of  China.  Beside 
Japan,  China  is  counted  as  one  of  the 
world's  weak  nations.  But  in  the  moral 
regeneration  that  is  bringing  about  the 
emergence  into  modern  life  of  her 
woman  she  is  fulfilling  a  deeper  and 
more  authentic  test  of  civilization  than 
has  been  met  by  Japan  in  all  her  fifty 
headlong  years  of  material  progress. 


Ill 

SOCIAL    REFORM 

BE  pleased  to  enter  the  Gate  of 
Hope,"  said  Captain  Ho. 
Our  rickshaws  had  been  trundhng  in 
and  out  of  the  mazes  of  little  lanes  and 
alleys  just  off  the  great  trunk  road 
leading  south  from  the  Chien  Men 
Gate.  Captain  Ho  was  the  captain  of 
the  Peking  pohce,  educated  at  the 
American  Mission  College,  !N'anking 
University,  who  had  learned  Northern 
ways  and  had  Northern  military  aspira- 
tions. He  was  a  dapper  little  man,  with 
a  small,  bristly  mustache,  and  could  not 
have  weighed  one  hundred  pounds.  In 
his  flannel  suit  and  Panama  hat  he 
looked  more  like  an  under-secretary  of 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     69 

the  Shanghai  Y.  M.  C.  A.  than  a  cap- 
tain of  pohce  with  a  record  for  cour- 
age and  quick  thinking,  and  with  four 
bullet  wounds  in  his  shoulders  and 
thigh;  but  as  he  stepped  nimbly  out  of 
his  rickshaw  the  wind  lifted  his  flannel 
coat  slightly,  and  a  gleam  of  metal  from 
his  hip  pocket  showed  that,  bland  as  he 
looked,  he  was  still  a  believer  in  pre- 
paredness. 

We  were  making  a  tour  about  what 
I  may  call,  for  lack  of  a  better  name,  the 
social  institutions  of  Peking,  inspecting 
in  that  intensely  conservative  Chinese 
city,  the  public  institutions  that  bore 
witness  to  the  very  recently  assumed  re- 
sponsibilities of  an  Oriental  municipal- 
ity. 

"Of  course  you  know  what  the  Gate 
of  Hope  is?"  said  Captain  Ho.  We 
were  waiting,  over  the  customary  tea 
and  cigarettes,  in  a  little  room  off  the 


70     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

courtyard  of  the  long,  low,  gray  build- 
ing, which  was  just  like  hundreds  of 
other  gray  buildings  throughout  that 
part  of  the  city,  while  the  doorkeeper 
took  our  cards  to  the  powers  within. 

"We  call  it  the  'Evil  to  Good'  insti- 
tution, for  it  is  here  that  women  of  the 
streets  are  brought  from  all  over  Pe- 
king, and  it  is  here  that  they  have  a 
temporary  home  and  refuge  and  a 
chance  to  live  a  better  life.  It  is  a  very 
tiny  institution  for  such  a  large  city. 
There  are  not  a  hundred  women  here, 
and  I  estimate  that  there  are  between 
four  and  five  thousand  women  in  Peking 
who  have  to  register  with  the  police  as 
women  of  the  town.  This  does  not 
count  the  enormous  numbers  of  "little 
wives,"  which  is  our  euphonious  name 
for  concubines,  many  of  whom  are  very 
young  girls  held  in  complete  slavery  in 
polygamous  households. 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     71 

"The  line  is  hard  to  draw,  but  the 
professional  women  must  register   at 
police  headquarters  and  be  medically 
examined.     The    examination    is    per- 
functory, but  on  the  basis  of  the  regis- 
tration we  arrange  many  marriages,  and 
keep  in  close  touch  with  any  man  liv- 
ing on  a  woman's  earnings.     We  have 
a  tax  of  from  two  dollars  a  month  for 
women  of  what  we  call  the  first  class 
down  to  twenty-five  cents  a  month  for 
women  of  the  fourth  class,  and  this  is 
collected    fortnightly    on    registration. 
Keeping  track  of  them  is  simplified  by 
the  fact  that  the  traffic  is  largely  con- 
centrated on  eight  streets  not  far  from 
here  and  in  about  eight  hundred  houses 
on  those  streets,  each  of  which  pays  a 
registration  fee  of  from  one  dollar  to 
eight  dollars  per  month,  according  to 
its  class.     We  watch  the  disorder  in 
those  houses  very  closely.     I  have  often 


72     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

been  stationed  near  them,  and  I  remem- 
ber one  night,  when  on  my  rounds,  I 
took  eight  girls  from  eight  different 
beatings  to  the  Gate  of  Hope.  We 
usually  have  to  take  them,  and  often  it 
is  at  the  risk  of  our  lives,  for  though 
they  are  beaten  and  ill  used,  they  are 
property,  and  the  men  and  women  who 
control  them  are  often  willing  to  fight 
desperately  rather  than  lose  them. 
Very  often  we  bring  them  straight 
from  some  terrible  beating  or  ill  usage, 
and  by  the  morning  after  they,  more 
than  likely,  want  to  go  back  again. 
Virtually  none  of  them  comes  here  of 
her  own  accord,  because  her  courage 
has  dwindled,  and  also  because — well, 
the  punishments  for  running  away,  you 
know,  are  very  terrible  indeed." 

"Have  you  any  ways  of  getting  at  the 
people  who  make  the  money  out  of  the 
trade?"  I  asked. 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     73 

"Not  many,"  said  my  friend,  lighting 
another  cigarette.  "It  would  interfere 
with  too  many  prominent  people."  I 
thought  I  had  heard  that  somewhere 
before.  "For  all  our  polygamy,  it  is 
one  of  the  institutions  of  Chinese  life. 
We  can't  all  afford  polygamy.  We 
do  what  we  can.  Men  have  been 
strangled  in  our  jail  for  violating  girls 
under  twelve, — we  have  a  very  strict 
law  against  it, — and  it  is  also  a  crime  to 
live  on  a  woman's  immoral  earnings." 

We  rose  to  greet  the  director,  an  as- 
tonishingly young  man,  plainly  dressed 
in  the  plain,  dark-blue  gown  of  the 
Chinese  official  classes.  He  was 
plainly  surprised  to  see  a  foreigner. 

"You  are  the  first  foreign  visitor  he  's 
ever  had  here,"  translated  Ho,  "and  he 
can't  understand  what  interests  you." 

We  went  through  a  long  passage- 
way hung  with  mottos  in  bold  Chinese 


74     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

characters,  containing  invocations  to 
virtue  such  as:  "Industry  brings  con- 
tent," "The  tiger  of  passion  will  carry 
you  at  last  to  the  jungle;  bestride  it 
not,"  and  "Every  woman  loves  a  home; 
be  grateful  for  this  one."  Between 
them  were  schedules  of  routine  work 
and  study.  One  learned  that  there  was 
ethical  teaching  on  Friday  afternoons, 
and  that  the  rest  of  the  week  was  di- 
vided between  reading  and  writing 
(many  of  the  women  are  of  course  il- 
literate ) ,  lace-making,  machine-sewing, 
cooking,  and  housekeeping,  spinning, 
weaving,  and  basket-making.  Though 
there  was  no  trace  of  Christian  influ- 
ence, Sunday  was  given  over  to  "recrea- 
tion." 

We  came  out  into  a  humming,  buzz- 
ing, high-studded  room  where  thirty  or 
more  girls  and  women  were  sitting 
about  and  demonstrating  to  the  eye  the 


The  lecture  liall  platform.  rrulei-  ijortraits  of  Mohammed, 
Christ,  Confucius,  Buddha,  and  Lao-tse  upholders  of  any  of 
these    religions    address    moral   discourses   on    separate    days 


Swedi.sh   drill    in    iIh'    opt-n   air 
SCENES  AT  THE  PEKING  METROrOLITAN  PRISON 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     75 

handicrafts  of  the  schedule.  The  buzz- 
ing of  tongues  stopped  at  once,  but  the 
humming  of  the  foreign  sewing-ma- 
chines went  on  with  redoubled  energy 
as  these  timid  daughters  of  old  China 
bent  out  of  sight  behind  their  work. 
Their  quiet,  smooth,  almost  expression- 
less faces  bore  little  trace  of  their  tragic 
stor}%  save  here  and  there  where  a  tiny 
undersized  girl  sat  in  a  corner  too  weak 
to  work,  or  scars  and  welts  gave  vivid 
testimony  of  past  cruelty.  Some  of 
these  infants  of  eight  and  nine  had  been 
little  dancing-girls;  others  represented 
the  toll  of  baby  shame  saved  by  the  crim- 
inal courts  from  a  fate  worse  than  death. 

"Where  do  they  go  from  here?"  I 
asked  the  young  director. 

"Most  of  them  marry,"  he  answered, 
eager  to  explain.  "You  see,  a  small 
fee  places  a  girl  here ;  then  she  supports 
herself  by  work.     So  it  is  not  charity. 


76     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Their  pictures  are  open  to  the  public. 
When  a  man  sees  a  girl  he  likes,  he 
sends  his  middleman,  as  in  all  other  Chi- 
nese marriages,  and  we  inquire  fully 
into  his  character.  If  that  is  satisfac- 
tory, we  allow  them  to  see  each  other. 
And  if  she  approves  of  him,  he  pays  us 
a  marriage  fee  of  anj^vhere  between 
five  dollars  and  fifty  dollars,  and  they 
are  married.  It  does  not  end  there, 
however.  We  are  in  close  touch  with 
the  police  force,  and  if  we  hear  from 
them  that  he  is  maltreating  her,  back  she 
comes  again,  and  he  has  to  account  to 
us." 

"Do  you  let  men  have  them  as  'little 
wives'?"  I  asked;  but  Ho  refused  to 
translate  this. 

"Yes,  they  do,"  he  answered  himself; 
"what  can  you  expect?  They  come 
from  very  bad  lives,  and  even  this  is  a 
big  improvement.     The  trouble  is  that 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA    77 

many  skinflints  who  would  like  to  buy 
girls,  but  do  not  want  to  pay  for  them, 
induce  them  to  run  away  and  come  here. 
Then  after  a  respectable  interval  they 
appear  as  suitors  and  get  them  for  their 
fourth  or  fifth  wives  at  a  nominal  price. 
That  is  bad,  very  bad,  and  some  people 
who  love  slander  say  that  this  institu- 
tion is  largely  supported  by  such  men. 
It  is  n't,  and  when  we  catch  one  of  them, 
we  give  him  the  full  extent  of  the  law 
for  fooling  the  police.  There  will  al- 
ways be  such  people." 

"Has  this  institution  anything  to  do 
with  the  Revolution?"  I  asked  the  di- 
rector, and  Ho  and  he  both  joined  in 
telhng  me  how,  if  it  had  n't  been  for 
the  republic,  it  wouldn't  have  been 
founded. 

"It  is  part  of  new  China,"  said  Ho, 
"but  we  have  no  public  opinion  to  help 
it.     Not  even  the  Christian  missionaries 


78    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

know  about  it.  But  new  men  in  the 
police  department  from  the  South  are 
chiefly  responsible  for  it.  And  they, 
like  myself,  received  their  early  train- 
ing at  a  mission  college." 

"Are  the  number  of  these  women  in- 
creasing?" I  asked  as  we  again  got  into 
our  rickshaws  at  the  gate. 

"Oh,  yes,"  Ho  replied.  "The  thou- 
sands of  students  who  have  come  back 
from  Japan  have  brought  with  them 
habits  which  the  average  Chinese  boy 
would  never  pick  up  at  home  in  any- 
thing like  the  same  extent.  Most  of 
the  present  members  of  parliament  have 
studied  in  Japan,  and  although  I  'm  an 
ardent  Republican,  and  had  two  sons 
who  went  through  the  fighting  round 
Hankow,  I  must  confess  that  in  this  re- 
spect they  're  not  much  better  than  the 
rest." 

We  were  rolling  out  along  the  great 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     79 

stone-flagged  road  that  runs  out  toward 
the  Temple  of  Agriculture. 

"I  'm  takmg  you  now,"  said  Ho,  "to 
see  the  Peking  Municipal  Prison,  the 
finest  prison  in  China.  It  is  one  of  the 
really  enlightened  reforms  of  the  past 
regime,  for  which  the  Manchus  re- 
ceived little  credit.  It  handles  the  seri- 
ous penal  cases  for  the  whole  of  Peking. 
Out  of  our  population  of  somewhere 
near  a  million  we  usually  have  about 
five  hundred  prisoners,  and  many  of 
them  are  first  offenders.  That 's  less 
than  one  in  two  thousand,  and  consider- 
ing the  fact  that  criminals  inevitably 
drift  toward  a  capital,  it 's  not  at  all  a 
bad  record." 

We  turned  a  corner  of  the  city  wall, 
and  came  in  sight  of  a  group  of  build- 
ings arranged  like  the  radiating  spokes 
of  a  wheel,  with  a  fine  administration 
building  near  the   center,   the  whole. 


80     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

with  a  few  outbuildings,  surrounded  by 
a  low  wall.  From  a  distance  it  looked 
flat  and  dun-colored,  like  the  Chinese 
fields  around  it,  but  going  nearer,  the 
first  impression  one  received  of  the 
whole  outfit  was  one  of  conspicuous 
efiiciency  and  cleanliness. 

The  governor,  a  tall,  grizzled  Chinese 
of  the  older  school,  met  us  at  the  gate, 
and  six  different  sets  of  soldiers  popped 
out  and  saluted  us  on  our  way  through 
the  maze  of  buildings  to  the  central  of- 
fices. Ex-President  Eliot  of  Harvard 
said  a  year  or  so  ago  that  the  Peking 
Prison  was  the  most  interesting  thing 
he  saw  in  his  whole  trip  through  China. 
I  think  the  "Gate  of  Hope"  is  more  in- 
teresting, but  I  should  place  this  mag- 
nificent prison  a  close  second. 

Take  the  workrooms,  for  instance. 
In  great,  high-studded  rooms  forty 
yards  square  by  a  measurement  I  was 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     81 

curious  enough  to  verify,  there  were 
groups  of  forty  or  fifty  men  working 
at  their  trade  under  conditions,  if  one 
considers  the  standard  of  living  of 
the  far  East,  ahnost  ideal.  There  were 
big  rooms  for  ten  or  more  trades,  includ- 
ing tailoring,  shoemaking,  woodwork- 
ing, ironsmithing,  bookbinding,  spin- 
ning and  weaving,  basket-making, 
printing,  and  several  others,  not  the 
least  of  which  was  market-gardening 
outdoors.  It  was  strange  to  hear,  out 
in  far-away  Peking,  in  a  city  through 
the  streets  of  which  I  had  traveled  con- 
tinuously for  six  weeks  without  once 
meeting  a  foreign  face  except  in  the 
tiny,  walled  foreign  quarter — it  was 
strange  to  hear  that  the  majority  of 
men  who  came  to  prison  knew  no  trade, 
and  that  the  best  way  to  make  them 
behave  themselves  like  decent  citi- 
zens when  they  got  out  was  to  teach 


82     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

them  a  trade.  It  was  all  what  we 
are  still  vainly  trying  to  practise  at 
home. 

At  the  Peking  Prison  they  not  only 
teach  prisoners  a  trade,  but  they  have  an 
employment  bureau  which  connects  a 
man  with  a  job.  They  segregate  first 
offenders  from  old-timers  and  men  con- 
victed of  light  offenses  from  those  guilty 
of  heavier  ones  up  through  second, 
third,  and  fourth  offenders.  In  fact, 
forgery,  petty  larceny,  robbery,  and  as- 
sault and  battery  are  the  names  of  cell 
rows  where  convicts  of  kindred  offenses 
are  exclusively  confined.  The  gover- 
nor confessed  that  the  atmosphere  of 
specialism  in  crime  might  be  rather  nar- 
rowing, but  it  was  all  in  the  name  of 
modernism  and  system. 

The  parole  system  has  been  intro- 
duced, and  the  governor  has  decided  to 
stick  to  it.     Physical  drill,  an  innova- 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     83 

tion  in  any  class  of  Chinese  society,  is 
held  daily,  and  the  setting-up  exercise 
I  saw  proved  that  the  men  enter  into 
it  with  appreciation  and  enthusiasm. 
But  the  outstanding  note  of  the  prison 
is  cleanliness  and  order.  The  cells  are 
large,  and  though  doubling  up  is  com- 
mon, they  are  dry  and  clean.  Electric 
lighted,  of  stone  construction  through- 
out, on  high  and  level  ground,  with  sani- 
tary conveniences  far  better  than  home 
standards  in  China,  the  great  prison  at 
Peking  is  as  much  a  lasting  credit  to 
the  far-reaching  social  reform  spirit 
of  the  Chinese  as  Sing  Sing,  for  in- 
stance, where  Warden  Osborne's  back 
is  still  against  the  wall,  is  a  disgraceful 
witness  to  the  complacent  conservatism 
of  America. 

We  went  up  into  the  cupola  as  the  six 
o'clock  bugle  blew  the  signal  to  stop 
work,  and  from  the  first  landing  we 


84     PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA 

could  see  long  lines  of  prisoners  waiting 
for   their   evening   wash.     They    were 
clad   in   clean   white    suits,    and   they 
stepped  briskly  along  to  the  wash-room, 
knowing  that  beyond  lay  supper.     Sup- 
per is  set  out  in  rice-bowls,  and  on  spe- 
cial occasions  there  are  three  sizes  of 
them,   a  j)otent  discrimination  against 
unruly  spirits.     Up  and  down  the  long 
tables,   with   completely   shaven  heads 
(the  laundry  workers  have  to  submit  to 
this,  too)  moved  the  cooks  and  waiters, 
and  as  we  went  on  up  the  stairs  the  hum 
of  talk  which  mingled  with  the  busy 
click  of  chop-sticks  showed  that  these 
Chinese  had  granted  another  mercy  that 
we  still  withhold  more  often  than  not  in 
the  civilized  West — the  mercy  of  talk  at 
meals. 

Up  in  the  cupola  was  the  assembly- 
room,  with  rows  and  rows  of  high-sided 
seats  that  enabled  the  prisoners  to  see 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     85 

the  platform,  but  not  one  another.  On 
the  wall  over  the  platform  I  saw  five 
crude  paintings  of  men  with  beards. 
In  regular  order,  beginning  at  the  left, 
the  governor  pointed  them  out  as  Mo- 
hammed, Jesus,  Confucius  (in  the  cen- 
ter), Buddha,  and  Lao-tsze,  the  founder 
of  the  Taoist  faith.  Thus  was  China 
liberal  to  all  religions,  and  every  Sun- 
day, when  the  prisoners  gathered  here, 
they  heard  a  moral  discourse  from  some 
representative  of  one  of  these  five 
creeds,  with  the  other  four  to  frown 
down  upon  him  with  united  disapproval 
if  he  became  too  ]3artizan. 

The  last  thing  we  saw  at  the  Peking 
Prison  was  a  set  of  the  instruments  of 
torture  with  which  prisoners  were 
brought  to  reason  in  days  gone  by. 
Balls  and  drags  for  the  feet,  vices  for 
breaking  the  bones  of  the  hand,  the  ter- 
rible old,  slicing  knife,  and,  amid  a  host 


86     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

of  other  tools,  two  handsomely  chased 
beheading  swords  with  nicked  and  rusty 
blades — how  wholesomely  they  fitted 
into  the  dusty  chamber  to  which  they 
were  once  again  to  be  consigned  away 
from  the  uses  of  man!  Only  the  light 
bamboo  is  allowed  to-day,  and  that 
very  sparingly,  at  this  prison;  and  as  a 
testimony  to  the  humane  treatment, 
which  I  have  since  verified,  let  it  be  said 
that  for  more  than  four  years  there  has 
not  been  a  single  attempt  to  escape.  If 
one  doubted  that  this  is  a  model  prison, 
could  one  have  any  better  proof  ? 

There  was  a  day  in  Peking  when  the 
gutters  of  the  streets  ran  in  floods  on 
rainy  days,  so  that  it  was  no  unusual 
thing  for  an  unwary  victun  who  lost 
his  footing,  particularly  a  small  child, 
to  fall  in  and  be  drowned.  The  rev- 
elations and  the  odors  on  the  coming  of 
dry  weather  made  it  a  veritable  city  of 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     87 

the  damned.  Since  those  days,  before 
the  siege,  the  spirit  of  the  city  has  en- 
tirely changed;  but  even  to-day  the  cu- 
rious traveler  may  poke  his  nose  into 
backwaters  of  the  old  capital's  life,  as 
I  did  the  next  day,  and  get  the  full 
stench  of  the  unregenerate  past. 

The  next  day's  trip  that  I  made  with 
Captain  Ho  included  a  visit  to  the  Boys' 
Industrial  Home  (the  Shih  Yi  Sou) 
and  the  poorhouse  (the  Ping  Ming 
Yuan) .  The  Shih  Yi  Sou  is  under  the 
capable  administration  of  the  ministry 
of  the  interior,  a  thoroughly  modern  de- 
partment of  the  Government,  and  is,  in 
its  way,  wholty  as  creditable  an  institu- 
tion as  the  Peking  Prison.  The  375 
boys  there,  rangmg  anywhere  from  fif- 
teen to  twenty-one  years  of  age,  are 
given  a  thoroughly  efficient  trade-school 
education  along  lines  that  could  hardly 
be   improved    in   the    Western   world. 


88     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

They  are  taught  tailoring,  tinsmithing, 
printing,  soap-making,  cloth-weaving, 
hat-making,  gardening,  and  half  a  score 
of  other  trades.  But  most  important 
of  all,  thej^  are  taught  under  a  clean, 
efficient,  and  humane  system  that  turns 
out  human  qualit}^  and  not  merely  good 
artisans.  The  boj'^s  we  saw  about  the 
neat,  spacious,  well-ventilated  buildings, 
in  their  clean  blue  uniforms,  had  good, 
shining  boy  faces  it  was  worth  while  go- 
ing to  see.  And  yet  when  they  came  to 
the  institution  they  were  beggar  was- 
trels, orphans,  paupers,  young  pick- 
pockets, and  incorrigibles  of  all  descrip- 
tions. The  Shih  Yi  Sou,  tucked  away 
in  the  trackless  heart  of  this  vast  Chi- 
nese city,  is  a  thoroughly  up-to-date, 
twentieth-centiu'j^  institution. 

The  Ping  ^ling  Yuan  is  hidden  away 
quite  as  obscurely,  but  it  is  hidden  in  a 
shameful  past  as  well.     It  is  the  city 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     89 

poorhouse,  and  as  such  it  is  a  disgrace 
to  the  city  that  has  been  touched 
deeply  with  the  humane  movements  of 
the  Repubhc.  Rows  and  rows  of  able- 
bodied  young  paupers,  men  sunk  in  the 
degenerate  sloth  of  an  idle  existence, 
hung  around  the  buildings.  Scattered 
among  them,  with  no  attempt  whatever 
at  alleviation  or  segregation,  were  the 
aged,  the  blind,  the  crippled,  the  deaf, 
the  destitute,  and  the  dumb.  From  out 
the  squalid  buildings  that  bordered  the 
dirty  and  unkempt  courtyards  dull, 
hopeless  eyes  and  rueful,  pasty  faces, 
men,  women,  and  children  alike,  ej^ed  us 
without  interest  and  without  intelli- 
gence. The  broken  bodies  of  the  aged 
and  the  helpless  little  bodies  of  orphans 
and  pauper  children  appeared  to  have 
been  cast  into  this  place  as  on  some  dust- 
heap  with  equal  callousness.  There 
was  no  expert  care  whatsoever;  only 


90     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

coolies  kept  them  in  bounds  and  saw 
that  they  received  their  meals. 

We  had  made  the  tour  of  the  build- 
ings and  were  turning  back  when  our 
guide  said  to  us,  "Would  you  like  to 
see  the  lunatics?"  He  spoke  as  though 
he  were  promising  us  an  interesting 
show.  He  pointed  with  a  grimace  to  a 
round  hole  cut  in  the  wall  for  a  door, 
giving  upon  another  set  of  courtyards 
that  we  had  not  noticed.  And  then  I 
heard  them.  I  had  been  hearing  them 
for  some  time,  I  believe,  but  now  I  knew 
what  that  weird  chanting  Babel  was. 
We  were  already  almost  in  a  state  of 
nausea,  and  as  I  started  I  felt  a  breath 
of  real  terror.  But  the  impulse  to 
go  was  overwhelming,  and  we  went 
through  the  little  round  door  into  the 
lunatics'  courtyard. 

I  took  one  step  inside  the  courtyard 
and  then  stopped.     I  shall  never  for- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     91 

get  that  sight  as  long  as  I  hve.  There 
must  have  been  eighty  people  in  the 
courtyard,  which  was  something  like 
fortj^  paces  square;  and  every  one  of 
these  people  was  a  drama  to  himself. 
In  the  middle  of  the  space  there  was  a 
well,  with  a  tin  dipper  on  its  rim,  and 
in  front  of  it  a  man  stood,  naked  to  the 
waist,  with  wildly  tousled  hair,  making 
what  seemed  to  be  a  speech  and  looking 
me  straight  in  the  eye.  I  had  never 
wholly  become  used  to  the  Chinese  face, 
especially  to  that  hostile,  absolutely 
unfeeling  stare  it  turns  on  the  foreigner 
as  he  is  going  through  the  street. 

This  man  turned  his  uncanny,  vacant 
face  on  me  and  came  walking  nearer 
and  nearer.  I  stood  transfixed  with 
terror.  And  then  suddenly  the  whole 
emotional  tension  snapped  as  two  or 
three  younger  men  rushed  out  and 
seized  his  pigtail,  and  began  to  play 


92     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

horse  with  him,  apparently  jealous  at 
his  occupying  the  center  of  the  stage. 
The  crowd  howled  in  glee  as  an  attend- 
ant in  kliaki  drove  them  off.  The  man 
sat  down  on  the  edge  of  the  well  and 
whimpered ;  and  only  then  could  I  take 
my  eyes  off  him  and  look  at  the  others. 
I  could  hear  the  sound  of  high,  falsetto 
singing;  but  could  not  place  it  any- 
w^here,  till  suddenly  I  noticed  a  dark  lit- 
tle man,  with  a  black  mustache,  in  a  cor- 
ner, a  pitiful,  fat,  extremely  sensible- 
looking  man,  who  sat  with  his  back' to 
the  crowd  and  sang  unceasingly. 

The  day  was  a  deadly  hot  summer 
day,  and  the  courtyard  was  dry  and 
blistering;  yet  one  half -naked  wretch 
deliberately  got  down  and  rolled  in  the 
noonday  sun,  moaning  piteously.  A 
guard  ran  over  to  him  nervously, 
picked  him  up  bodily,  and  carried  him 
to  a  bench.     He  rolled  off,  but  in  the 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     93 

shade,  and  still  moaned  and  moaned. 
Near  him,  and  regarding  us  intently, 
was  a  man  with  a  red  flower  behind  one 
ear  and  a  large  leaf  behind  the  other. 
Everywhere  I  looked,  my  eyes  would 
meet  a  face  that  would  at  once  be- 
come a  vacant  grin;  one  man  put  his 
hand  to  his  head  and  crooked  his  knees, 
— he  was  a  tall  wizen  old  man  with 
a  face  like  a  satyr, — asking  for  money 
in  the  familiar  beggar  gestures  of  the 
street,  and  grimacing  horribly  every 
time  I  looked  in  his  direction. 

Some  were  new  cases,  with  what  hope 
of  improvement  in  that  ghastly  atmos- 
phere no  one  seemed  to  care.  And 
over  in  one  corner  were  the  women. 
Many  of  them  were  old,  but  one  or 
two  were  young  and  pretty,  and  one 
kept  putting  on  clothes  every  time  I 
looked  in  her  direction,  one  coat  after 
another  until  she  must  have  had  on  at 


94     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

least  five.  Here  was  a  boy  of  eight, 
incurable,  just  come  in.  And  round 
about  them  walked  the  coolie  guards, 
grinning  at  their  queer  antics  as  at  a 
game. 

We  stood  there — it  must  have  been 
fifteen  minutes — without  speaking  a 
word.  I  had  intended  to  take  a  pic- 
ture, but  as  I  folded  up  my  camera  Ho 
said,  "Yes,  for  God's  sake,  let 's  leave 
them  to  their  misery."  I  can  still  hear 
the  yell  that  pursued  us  as  we  ducked 
through  the  little  round  door  again — a 
yell  in  which  the  whole  eighty  voices 
seemed  to  join  in  a  fiendish  chorus,  and 
which  rang  through  my  mind  through- 
out the  journey  home,  and  has  rung  in 
it  intermittently  to  this  day. 

I  left  Peking  for  the  South  shortly 
afterward,  but  before  I  left.  Ho  prom- 
ised to  move  heaven  and  earth  to  have 
this   pitiful   lot   of   people   put   under 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     95 

decent  care,  and  wipe  out  the  terrible 
blot  on  modern  China  represented  by 
the  condition  of  the  whole  institution. 
I  am  sure  that  he  has  done  it,  as  I  heard 
a  few  months  ago  from  a  friend  in  the 
Peking  Y.  M.  C.  A.  that  the  lunatics' 
compound  had  been  entirely  reformed 
since  we  had  visited  it  the  year  before. 
I  believe  it  has  been,  for  there  is  no 
reason  why  the  Peking  Lunatic  Asylum 
should  not  be  quite  as  good  an  institu- 
tion as  the  Peking  Prison. 

In  bringing  to  practical  extinction 
within  ten  years  the  age-long  national 
curse  of  the  opium  traffic,  the  Chinese 
have  shown  the  unconquerable  resolu- 
tion which  makes  for  social  betterment. 
That  is  their  true  mettle,  and  we  of  the 
Western  world,  for  all  our  boasted 
progress  against  social  evils,  would  look 
long  to  find  a  moral  crusade  to  match 
it  in  fervor  and  success.     But  a  peep 


96     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

into  a  dark  corner  of  the  unregenerate 
past  is  necessary  to  set  against  this 
splendid  endeavor.  Seeing  and  remem- 
bering the  Ping  Ming  Yuan  of  Peking, 
we  can  feel  to  the  full  the  imaginative 
application  to  China  of  Cecil  Rhodes's 
famous  epitaph,  "So  much  to  do,  so 
little  done!" 


IV 

RADICALISM    AND    THE   RADICALS 

1REJSIEMBER  the  Ha-ta-men 
street  as  the  place  which  kept  me 
down  to  earth  in  China.  The  Ha-ta- 
men  street  is  one  of  the  great  thorough- 
fares of  Peking;  it  skirts  the  legation 
quarter  and  plunges  through  the  great 
gateway  from  which  it  takes  its  name 
into  the  heart  of  the  teeming  small  shop 
quarter  of  the  city.  After  listening  all 
day  to  the  frock-coated  students  of  the 
South  playing  at  democratic  govern- 
ment in  their  parliament,  after  talking 
to  suffragettes,  so-called,  after  lunch- 
ing with  a  president  of  the  Senate  who 
spoke  brilliant  French  and  claimed  to 
be  a  socialist,  after  listening  to  plans  for 

97 


98     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

internationalism,  Esperanto  and  social 
reform,  in  a  word,  after  touching  day 
after  day  the  hem  of  that  splendid  gar- 
ment of  moderism  which  this  band  of 
patriots  and  pioneers  were  trying  to  cut 
to  their  country's  fit,  it  was  helpful  and 
chastening  to  see  that  nation  revealed 
on  the  Ha-ta-men  street  in  the  naked 
reality  of  its  common  people. 

The  strange  and  tireless  pageantry  of 
that  street  is  one  of  the  freshest  and 
most  enduring  impressions  I  have  of 
China.  I  can  see  it  now  as  it  was  in  the 
evening,  a  great,  broad,  dim  road  thirty 
feet  or  more  from  curb  to  curb,  full  of 
little  flickering  lights  and  swarms  of 
people  and  strange  smells.  It  is  four 
hours  after  sundown  and  still  from  side 
to  side  this  great  street  is  crowded 
with  people.  Under  the  flare  of  hun- 
dreds of  peanut-oil  lamps  the  keepers  of 
the  outdoor  bazaars  are  doing  a  thriving 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     99 

trade.  Here  is  a  street  restaurant  with 
its  twisted  cakes  sizzling  noisily  in  hot 
pans  and  bowls  of  pungent  broth  and 
chopped  meat  and  vegetables  hustling 
over  the  crowded  counter  to  the  clamor- 
ous, quarreling,  half  naked  mob  of  cus- 
tomers. Just  beyond  a  man  cries,  in  a 
terrifying  liquid  guttural,  the  virtues  of 
a  cold  red  drink  which  he  is  ladling  out 
in  cups.  Across  the  road  a  little  magi- 
cian sits  with  drooping  mustache  and 
cunning  eyes,  and  holds  a  crowd  spell- 
bound at  his  tales  of  fortune  read  from 
little  ivory  sticks.  Beside  him  a  tall  old 
man  with  a  sparse,  straggling  beard  sells 
American  cigarettes,  ten  for  a  cent, 
while  further  along  a  lean  young  man 
with  shaven  head,  in  a  gray  robe,  look- 
ing much  like  a  Buddhist  monk,  draws  a 
secular  and  very  profitable  custom  ma- 
nipulating white  dice  in  and  out  of  a 
brown  leather  bag. 


100    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Along  the  dimly  lit  roadway  rick- 
shaws clatter  swiftly,  threading  their 
way  among  the  people  by  miraculous 
lunges  from  side  to  side.  Their  pass- 
engers are  inconspicuous,  but  here  and 
there  a  gaily  dressed  lady  flashes  by. 
Children  in  all  stages  of  nakedness  chase 
after  them  like  little  minnows  in  a  pool. 
Up  and  down  the  street  drift  the 
crowds;  past  the  bazaars  and  the  street 
merchants  and  the  beggars,  countless 
streams  of  people  move  about  in  the 
myriad  gleams  of  lanterns  and  bobbing 
rickshaw  lights.  From  a  mysterious 
house  on  the  corner  comes  the  shrill  wail- 
ing of  a  Chinese  fiddle,  and  every  now 
and  then  a  man  walking  past  you  will 
break  out  into  unearthly  harmonics  in  a 
wavering  falsetto.  The  noise  is  inces- 
sant. The  shoving  restless  crowds  seem 
endless,  and  yet,  with  a  calm  like  still 
water,  women's  faces  looking  passively 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     101 

at  you  from  behind  bazaars  and  an  occa- 
sional doorway. 

It  is  stifling  hot,  and  the  air  is  heavy 
with  strange  cooking  and  the  humidity 
of  half  clad  people,  while  over  the  silent 
stretches  of  flat  roofs  on  either  side  rises 
the  vast  gate  tower  of  Ha-ta-men,  lift- 
ing its  huge  upturning  eaves  into  the 
night  with  the  overspreading  perma- 
nence of  the  unchanging  East.  The 
contagious  squalor  of  this  environment, 
the  heavy,  sensuous,  relaxing  air  which 
is  more  than  a  physical  element  in  its 
unholy  composition — it  is  these  which 
bring  home  to  a  westerner  the  evil  spell 
which  hangs  over  the  East.  Under  the 
cruel,  upspringing,  scornful  lines  of 
this  tower,  crouching  on  the  wall  which 
runs  on  either  side  as  far  as  the  eye  can 
see,  flows  the  life  of  the  common  people 
of  China.  And  as  the  busy,  sordid, 
swarming  life  of  the  Ha-ta-men  brings 


102    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

to  your  mind  the  way  in  which  these  peo- 
ple have  lived  for  centuries,  so  the  un- 
aspiring malignant  tower  above  them, 
typifies  unforgettably  for  you  and  for 
them  the  mean  and  alien  despotism 
which  has  ruled  them  and  crushed  them 
and  forgotten  them. 

Now  that  despotism  is  gone;  new 
hopes,  new  ideas,  and  a  new  restlessness 
are  abroad  in  the  land.  Schools  are 
coming,  laws  are  more  just,  and  the 
law's  penalties  in  prison  and  social  insti- 
tution are  losing  the  cruel  edge  of  the 
past.  But  of  the  new  idea^,  what  of 
that?  Where  can  you  see  the  republic, 
the  new  China,  radicalism  along  the  Ha- 
ta-men  street?  What  is  there  here 
among  these  medieval  crowds  to  tell  you 
that  you  are  in  the  same  country,  in  the 
same  city,  in  the  same  century  with  a 
Chinese  parliament?  I  could  see  noth- 
ing.    And  that  is  why  walking  along 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     103 

the  Ha-ta-men  street  was  a  chastening 
experience  to  my  warm  sympathies  with 
China's  hot-blooded  radicahsm.  It 
brought  one  down  to  earth,  to  a  type  of 
life  on  which  the  new  words  and  the  new 
feelings  seemed  to  have  no  effect  what- 
soever. And  I  came  to  feel  that  unless 
I  could  find  a  sign  of  the  New  China  in 
the  Ha-ta-men  street,  even  though  that 
street  were  in  the  heart  of  the  unsympa- 
thetic capital  of  the  unprogressive 
North,  and  among  the  common  people 
whose  superstitions  against  reform  were 
eloquent  still  in  ghostly  memories  of 
Boxerism,  I  could  not  really  believe  in 
the  Chinese  revolution. 

And  then  one  night  I  found  it.  I 
was  walking  through  the  Ha-ta-men  dis- 
trict with  a  friend  who  spoke  Chinese, 
if  anything  more  fluently  than  the  peo- 
ple themselves.  He  had  been  in  China 
thirty  years,  as  interpreter,  mining  en- 


104    PRESENT-DAY  CHINxl 

gineer,  customs  official,  and  unofficial 
doctor  and  missionary ;  and  for  the  past 
year  or  so  he  had  been  spending  his  time 
in  a  little  village  where  nobody  could 
speak  English  and  only  eight  people 
could  read  or  write  at  all.  When  he 
came  up  to  Peking  it  was  an  event;  he, 
too,  w^as  looking  for  the  revolution 
among  the  common  people,  and,  being 
an  old  China  hand,  he  did  n't  believe  he 
would  find  it. 

We  came  to  a  little  lane  down  which 
the  chief  things  noticeable  were  a  lot  of 
flickering  lights  among  a  silent  crowd 
— and  a  Voice.  The  lights  belonged  to 
rickshaws  of  which  there  were  a  dozen 
or  so  along  the  wall  and  through  the 
crowd,  and  the  Voice  belonged  to  an 
earnest,  clean-shaven,  attractive  looking 
rickshaw  man  who  was  standing  be- 
tween the  shafts  of  his  old  iron-tired 
rickshaw  in  the  center  of  the  crowd. 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     105 

"This  fellow  must  have  a  sun-stroke," 
my  friend  was  saj^ing,  when — "hold  on 
a  minute,"  he  said,  stopping  sharply. 
"  '^lin  kuo.  Mm  kuo' ;  do  you  hear  that? 
It  means  republic.  Look  here,  there  is 
something  more  than  meets  the  eye 
down  this  lane;  let 's  go  and  see." 

On  nearer  view  the  crowd  appeared 
to  be  about  half  a  hundred  people,  al- 
most all  workers  or  artizans,  wuth  a 
dozen  or  so  women  scattered  among 
them.  The  edges  of  the  crowd,  that  is, 
inside  of  a  considerable  fringe  of  street 
arabs,  came  and  went  continually,  but 
the  great  majority  stood  still  and  lis- 
tened ;  and  gradually  we  discovered  that 
it  was  n't  a  sun-stroke  and  was  n't  a 
quarrel  but  was  that  unlieard  of  thing  in 
China — a  street  speaker.  And  the  way 
he  talked  to  the  people  of  the  Ha-ta- 
men  street  was  as  instructive  as  it  was 
amazing.     My    friend    translated    be- 


106    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

tween  gasps  of  surprise  and  apprecia- 
tion, for  he  was  a  keen  admirer  of  the 
Chinese  mind,  especially  when  it  was 
whetted  in  argument. 

The  rickshaw  orator  first  got  his 
crowd  interested  in  himself.  He  told 
them  his  father  had  an  official  post  but 
because  he  was  not  willing  to  pay  bribes 
to  retain  it,  he  had  been  displaced  by  a 
man  who  was  willing  to  purchase  favors. 
Now  his  family  was  penniless  and  he 
was  not  afraid  to  go  out  and  work  for 
a  living  among  the  honest  rickshawmen 
of  Peking.  He  pointed  the  moral  with 
rhetorical  questions  in  finished  street 
orator  style.  "But  why  should  we  be 
robbed  with  this  bribery  and  squeeze 
now?"  he  said.  "What  is  the  use  of  a 
republic  if  they  still  want  money  for 
only  taking  in  your  card  to  some  fat  of- 
ficial ?  Should  n't  we  have  all  the  more 
under  a  republic  a  preference  for  char- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     107 

acter  and  merit  instead  of  corruption? 
Don't  forget  it,  the  people  are  powerful 
now.  Why  should  we  let  these  crooked 
officials  do  anything  they  please?" 

*'You  know,"  said  my  friend,  excit- 
edly interrupting  his  translation,  "this 
is  a  serious  business  if  there  are  any  po- 
lice in  hearing."  But  it  soon  became 
more  serious,  for  the  speaker  left  the 
minor  officials  and  began  to  attack  the 
President  himself. 

*'We  have  no  more  kings  now,  no 
more  emperors.  We  have  a  president 
who  is  supposed  to  do  what  we,  the  peo- 
jdIc,  want  him  to  do,  and  yet  this  presi- 
dent issues  decrees  just  as  the  Manchus 
did;  and  he  says  'I  decree,  I  proclaim,' 
and  he  expects  you  to  say  'we  tremble 
and  obey.'  But  this  man  is  not  a  God, 
he  is  not  even  a  scholar,  but  is  only  an 
ambitious  soldier,  and  unless  we  watch 
him  and  make  him  fear  us,  he  will  de- 


108     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

ceive  and  betray  the  people  just  as  the 
Manchus  did  before  him." 

"Don't  think  I  ^m  angry,"  continued 
the  young  speaker;  "I  will  talk  these 
things  over  calmly  with  anybody  here. 
I  will  come  again  to-morrow  at  this  time, 
but  don't  tell  anybody  about  it  because 
I  don't  want  to  have  a  disturbance  on 
the  street.  I  might  get  arrested  and 
then  my  father  would  starve."  He  be- 
gan to  wheel  his  rickshaw  ahead  of  him 
through  the  crowd.  His  voice  had  been 
very  attractive,  his  words  well  chosen. 
Unquestionably,  he  had  a  sort  of  spell 
over  these  people.  But  no  one  moved, 
no  one  asked  a  question.  He  was  obvi- 
ously a  stranger  and  they  were  a  little 
shy  of  him.  Now  he  turned  his  rick- 
shaw around  and  the  light  which  had  lit 
up  his  keen  expressive  face  in  the  center 
of  the  crowd,  disappeared.  But  as  he 
went  out  to  the  mouth  of  the  alley  he 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     109 

was  still  talking  and  among  his  last 
words  I  caught  one  significant  phrase 
myself.  "Kuo  Ming  Tang,"  it  was,  the 
name,  already  known  throughout  China, 
of  the  revolutionary  party  of  Sun  Yat- 
sen,  the  student  Jacobins,  the  intellect- 
ual sans-culottes  of  the  Chinese  Revo- 
lution. "That  places  him''  said  my 
friend,  "and  he  is  n't  the  only  rickshaw- 
man,  real  or  pretended,  who  has  been 
heard  of  (though  I  never  believed  it  my- 
self) working  up  the  people's  minds  in 
the  alleys  and  dark  corners  of  Peking. 
These  people  had  a  new  sensation  to- 
night ;  they  never  heard  anything  like  it 
before;  and  they  won't  soon  forget  it. 
You  can't  begin  to  realize  what  this  sort 
of  thing  means  in  China.  Fifteen  years 
ago  a  man  like  that  would  have  been  in 
danger  of  his  life,  for  then  the  Southern 
reform  devils  were  just  as  despised  as 
the    foreign    devils    themselves.     And 


110     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

there  was  hate  right  here  for  both 
a-plenty;  Count  von  Waldersee  was 
murdered  within  the  sound  of  that  rick- 
shawman's  voice  on  the  open  Ha-ta-men 
street.  And  now,  on  the  same  street, 
you  have  a  crowd  hstening  to  hberahsm, 
reform,  and  the  repubhc.  That 's  the 
new  China.  I  've  Hved  here  ahnost 
thirty  years,  and  I  never  saw  it  so  viv- 
idly as  to-night." 

The  man  had  gone  but  the  crowd  lin- 
gered. Long  after  we  had  gone  up  to 
our  cubicles  in  the  mission  hospital  on 
the  corner  where  we  were  staying,  knots 
of  people  hung  about,  lights  flickered, 
and  the  hum  of  talk  came  up  to  our  win- 
dows. Only  after  midnight  was  there 
quiet  at  last  along  this  strange  old 
street,  a  quiet  which  the  squeal  of  a  fid- 
dle somewhere  along  the  deserted  alley 
only  seemed  to  make  more  still.  But 
the  Ha-ta-men  was  a  different  place  to 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     111 

me  now.  On  that  time-sodden  street  I 
had  caught  the  heart-beat  of  the  present 
among  the  common  people.  That 
queer,  naive  but  stirring  talk  had  been 
their  notice  of  the  revolution.  To  me 
it  was  a  sign  that  no  corner  of  China,  no 
class  of  the  Chinese  people  could  be  sure 
of  being  without  the  range  of  its  influ- 
ence. If  the  Revolution  was  abroad  on 
the  Ha-ta-men  street,  it  was  abroad 
among  the  Chinese  people. 

This  is  a  chapter  of  impressions. 
The  intense  and  imaginative  radicalism 
of  Young  China  eludes  altogether  the 
heavy,  analytical  method  with  which 
foreigners  in  China  usually  try  to  ac- 
count for  it.  Life  on  the  Ha-ta-men 
street  is  strange  enough,  but  there  is  a 
key  to  it  which  any  Westerner  can  grasp 
— money.  The  incessant  talk  of  the 
people,  the  confusion,  the  weird  energy 


112     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

you  everywhere  see  responds  inevitably 
to  this  touchstone;  the  one  paramount 
motive  is  and  must  be  to  wring  a  Hving 
out  of  the  swarming  land.  From  the 
lowest  coolie  hoeing  his  washed-out  half- 
acre  on  a  precipice  to  the  highest  official 
sharing  his  patrimony  among  his  flocks 
of  relatives-of-prey,  the  token  is  the 
same ;  the  urge  of  the  one  toward  starva- 
tion and  thrift  and  of  the  other  toward 
corruption  and  avarice  are  identical  and 
irresistible.  I  have  seen  soldiers  under 
fire  bartering  with  a  ragged  huckster 
for  eleven  nuts  for  a  cash  instead  of  ten. 
Missionaries  who  have  listened  to  Chi- 
nese street-talk  all  their  lives  say  that 
nine  snatches  of  conversation  out  of  ten 
are  about  money. 

This  is  not  the  key  to  Chinese  radical- 
ism. It  is  as  elusive  in  economic  basis 
and  as  hard  to  reconcile  with  material 
forces  as  was  the  Utopianism  of  Boston 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     113 

transcendentalism.  Mr.  Pott's  young 
man  read  up  on  Chinese  metaphysics  for 
the  "Eatanswill  Gazette"  by  studying 
China  under  the  letter  C  in  the  Encyclo- 
pedia Britannica,  and  metaphysics  un- 
der the  letter  M — and  "combining  his 
information,  Sir."  .  But  as  the  young 
orator  on  the  Ha-ta-men  street  brought 
a  message  which  the  people  listened  to 
and  recognized,  so  the  student  of  Chi- 
nese radicalism  to-day  can  understand 
something  of  its  meaning  and  quality  of 
mind  by  a  method  much  more  direct 
than  mere  materialistic  analysis,  and 
still  avoiding  the  interesting  error  of 
Mr.  Pott's  young  man. 

He  can  go  to  the  bringers  of  this  mes- 
sage themselves.  That  is  what  I  pro- 
pose to  do  in  this  chapter. 

I  begin  irresistibly  with  that  extraor- 
dinary spirit,  whose  name  appears  in  no 
history   of   the   Revolution,   who   first 


114     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

brought  home  to  me  the  real  quality  of 
the  revolutionary  mind  of  Young  China, 
Hain  Jou-kia.  I  met  Hain  in  London 
in  1912.  His  headquarters  were  in 
Paris,  and  it  was  in  Paris  that  he  organ- 
ized the  banquet,  at  which  Anatole 
France  was  the  principal  speaker,  which 
gave  the  Chinese  Republic  its  first  greet- 
ings from  the  liberal  culture  of  Eu- 
rope. He  came  from  a  famous  literary 
family  in  the  far  southern  province  of 
Kwangsi;  and  for  a  year,  when  the 
Chinese  Republic  was  struggling  for 
recognition  among  the  world's  powers, 
and  the  leaders  of  the  First  Revolution 
still  had  a  fighting  chance  of  success, 
he  occupied  a  position  in  Paris  remind- 
ing one  of  Benjamin  Franklin.  He 
organized  the  first  society  in  Europe  to 
promote  sympathy  and  understanding 
with  republican  China,  the  Ligue  Sino- 
Fran9aise.     And  in  the  later  months  of 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     115 

the  year  he  planned  another  instrument 
of  mutual  understanding,  a  tour  of 
members  of  European  parliaments  with 
republican  sympathies  overland  to 
China.  It  was  on  this  mission  that  he 
came  to  London,  and,  among  a  shoal  of 
other  newspaper  men,  I  interviewed  him 
at  the  House  of  Commons.  I  found  him 
a  man  looking  little  more  than  thirty,  but 
an  alert,  enthusiastic  propagandist  for 
his  country's  cause,  a  pronounced  vision- 
ary and  doctrinaire,  but  a  shrewd  organ- 
izer and  a  very  convincing  personality. 
I  suppose  his  newness  to  the  world  of 
labor  problems.  Socialism,  and  free 
thought  into  which  he  had  so  lately  come 
tilted  his  judgment  a  little,  but  certainly 
his  radicalism  had  in  it  to  me  an  aston- 
ishing tang  of  daring.  He  began  to 
study  Socialism,  he  said,  as  soon  as  he 
arrived  in  Europe,  and  he  saw  in  it  the 
only  way  by  which  the  Orient  could  de- 


116     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

velop  its  material  resources  and  still 
avoid  the  orgy  of  capitalist  selfishness 
into  which  industrialism  had  thrown  the 
whole  of  Europe.  "We  in  China,"  he 
said,  "have  no  nobility  of  blood;  and,  if 
we  can  help  it,  we  're  going  to  have  no 
nobility  of  capital  and  industrial  enter- 
prise." He  soberly  told  astonished 
members  of  Parliament  that  there  was 
very  little  in  Socialism  that  was  n't  in 
Confucius  anyhow;  and  for  his  part,  he 
was  just  a  little  "plus  avarice/'  Social- 
ism suffered  from  too  much  politics,  too 
much  compromise  with  legahstic  quib- 
bling; the  radical  democracy  of  the  fu- 
ture would  have  an  element  of  coopera- 
tion and  an  element  of  syndicalism  in  it, 
which  merely  meant  that  the  rights  of 
the  consumer  and  the  rights  of  the 
worker  would  be  directly  maintained  by 
the  parties  themselves,  without  constant 
resource  to  political  dickering. 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     117 

Hain  Jou-kia  never  got  his  parlia- 
mentary delegation  off  for  China.  The 
murder  of  Sung  Chiao-jen  and  the  rum- 
bling of  the  revolution  behind  the  Six 
Power  Loan  spiked  this  as  they  spiked 
scores  of  other  projects  of  liberal  China. 
Month  after  month  it  was  postponed; 
the  money  was  ready  at  the  Chinese 
Embassy  in  London;  but  each  time  a 
fresh  crisis  set  the  date  back  again. 
Finally,  Hain  Jou-kia  saw  the  end  of 
his  party  and  his  principles  at  home, 
canceled  the  arrangements  and  re- 
turned to  China.  I  was  the  only  ar- 
rangement he  did  n't  cancel.  The 
threat  of  revolution  cooled  the  ardor  of 
the  politicians;  but  to  a  young  journal- 
ist, still  ardent  over  lost  causes  and  to 
whom  China's  bid  for  freedom  had  al- 
ready begun  to  seem  the  most  stirring 
and  potent  event  of  the  time,  the  op- 
portunity was  a  challenge.     I  bought 


118     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

my  ticket  to  China  the  day  after  the 
passage  of  the  Big  Loan  made  a  south- 
ern revolution  inevitable. 

When  I  arrived  in  Peking  the  Parlia- 
ment, summoned  only  six  weeks  before, 
had  already  passed  into  its  desperate 
fight  for  existence.  The  talks  with 
Hain  Jou-kia  I  had  begun  in  the  House 
of  Commons  lobbies  I  continued  in  his 
little  bachelor  quarters  outside  the  Tar- 
tar Wall ;  we  went  from  friend  to  friend, 
from  meeting  to  meeting  in  springless 
Peking  carts  and  latticed  carriages.  I 
saw  the  men  who  had  hoped  to  found  a 
national  party  in  China;  I  saw  the  net 
growing  round  them ;  I  saw  their  move- 
ment narrow  gradually  but  inevitably 
from  a  political  opposition  to  a  secret 
conspiracy  against  the  government. 
One  man  in  a  palace  in  the  Forbidden 
City  held  the  strings.  They  never  saw 
him,  but  the  power  he  silently  directed 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     119 

was  all  around  them.  He  controlled 
the  army  and  the  treasury,  and  before 
those  things  their  Parliament  was  a 
pawn  on  the  board.  With  the  treasury 
he  bribed  incessantly,  with  cash,  with 
office,  with  all  kinds  of  empty  honors; 
and  he  raised  new  troops  and  paid  the 
old  regularly.  With  his  army,  he  made 
secret  arrests.  Seven  members  of  the 
Senate  were  arrested  and  taken  to  Tien- 
tsin. The  president  of  the  Senate  re- 
fused to  preside  over  the  chamber;  the 
vice-president,  a  man  far  less  radical, 
took  his  place.  Secret  executions  went 
on.  The  detectives  were  everywhere; 
the  military  courts  were  absolutely  in 
the  hands  of  the  man  in  the  palace.  His 
power  was  compact,  it  worked  on  a  plan, 
it  had  the  legations  of  the  foreign  pow- 
ers, and  the  instruments  of  domestic  tyr- 
anny behind  it.  The  radicals  only  had 
the  appeal  to  the  people.     Finally  they 


120     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

used  it,  and  the  world  knows  now  how  it 
failed  them. 

Add  to  this  steady  drift  the  reasons 
for  the  political  failure  of  the  Revolu- 
tion, as  I  have  given  them  in  the  first 
chapter,  and  you  will  know  at  what  end 
to  grasp  the  situation.  The  radicals 
had  their  backs  to  the  wall.  They  had 
come  to  Peking  to  plan  for  a  new  re- 
gime; as  Hain  Jou-kia  had  gone  to 
Paris  to  justify  it  before  Europe.  But 
in  Peking  they  found  Yuan  Shih-k'ai 
completely  obdurate,  threatening  with 
jealous  hatred  any  liberal  platform 
which  diverted  from  him  any  part  of 
the  concentration  of  power  to  which  he 
had  devoted,  and  still  devotes,  the  whole 
of  his  political  strategy. 

I  did  not  see  then  that  the  end  was 
inevitable;  the  fight  was  still  on,  the 
ParHament  was  still  the  center  of  inter- 
est in  the  country,  and  the  Kuo  Ming 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     121 

Tang,  founded  less  than  a  year  before 
as  the  united  radical  party  of  the  South, 
was  at  the  height  of  its  career.  The 
Kuo  Ming  Tang  was  more  than  a  po- 
litical party;  it  was  a  national  move- 
ment, a  great  social  agitation.  In  Pe- 
king its  headquarters  suggested  the 
Jacobin  Club  during  the  French  Revo- 
lution. Every  day  a  meeting  was  held 
here,  every  day  the  policy  of  the  moment 
was  discussed  in  the  presence  of  sev- 
eral hundred  members  and  fixed  accord- 
ing to  the  fiercest  consensus  of  opinion, 
a  characteristic  Chinese  revolutionary 
practice. 

I  remember  the  Kuo  Ming  Tang  as 
a  sunny  courtyard  set  back  from  the 
street  in  the  center  of  a  cool,  wide,  low- 
roofed  Chinese  building.  Crossing  and 
re-crossing  slantwise  through  the  front 
passage  and  standing  about  in  groups 
in  this  courtyard  were  scores  of  young 


122     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Chinese,  talking  in  informal,  animated 
groups.  The  general  impression  was 
one  of  great  color  and  spirit.  Directly 
ahead  was  the  big  discussion  room, 
crowded  with  Chinese  flags  and  strings 
of  foreign  bunting,  and  here  over  a  hun- 
dred members  were  already  seated,  wait- 
ing for  the  day's  meeting.  Youth  had 
a  striking  majority  in  this  gathering, 
and  the  number  wearing  European 
dress,  was  more  than  one  half,  the  rest 
being  in  the  typical  long  gray  silk  gown 
of  the  well-to-do  Chinese.  The  buzz  of 
continual  conversation  filled  the  place; 
and  it  was  noticeable  how  many  of  the 
men  present,  often  the  most  boyish  look- 
ing of  all,  wore  the  gold  and  silver  stars 
which  betokened  membership  in  Parlia- 
ment. Newspapers  were  also  consider- 
ably to  the  fore ;  a  big  file  representing  a 
liberal  selection  from  the  thousand  and 
one  journals  that  had  recently  sprung 


r~  'I' 


■•«.«.-."     t!    J   I  I 


ly  I  i  I  i  I  i  i  ■  -I  I  M  r       1 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     123 

up  all  over  the  country,  was  kept  in  one 
of  a  row  of  little  offices  on  one  side,  and 
in  the  center  of  almost  every  group 
some  one  held  a  newspaper  as  a  brief  for 
his  argument.  The  informality  was 
particularly  noticeable — after  the  bow- 
ing and  scraping  you  could  see  on  the 
streets  of  the  Imperial  city,  the  bearing 
of  these  young  men  was  more  like  that 
of  American  college  students  than  of 
mandarins.  There  was  very  little 
laughter  to  be  heard,  very  few  smiles  to 
be  seen;  the  general  attitude  was  strik- 
ingly French — very  earnest,  very  excit- 
able and  gesticular,  yet  all  in  good  poise 
and  the  best  of  manners. 

I  came  to  the  party  headquarters  with 
Speaker  Chang  Chi  of  the  Senate  and 
while  we  sat  in  one  of  the  many  con- 
spirators' corners  over  a  tiny  cup  of  tea, 
he  told  me  something  of  the  idea  behind 
the  determined  little  group  of  men  who 


124     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

had  brought  the  Kuo  Ming  Tang  into 
being.  He  was  a  slight  man,  with  a 
face  of  the  North,  a  trifle  full,  with 
steady  eyes  and  thick  hair,  young  and 
vigorous.  He  had  studied  in  Japan, 
and  had  spent  four  years  in  Paris — like 
Hain  Jou-kia,  he  spoke  only  French  to 
foreigners.  His  student-days  in  France 
had  brought  him  into  close  touch  with 
Jaures,  the  French  Socialist  leader,  and 
it  was  a  little  strange  to  reflect  that  this 
man  too,  a  prime  mover  in  the  Revolu- 
tion and  now  the  presiding  officer  of  the 
Senate,  had  come  back  from  Em-ope 
with  firm  social  democratic  convictions. 

I  asked  Chang  Chi  to  tell  me  two 
things  about  the  Kuo  Ming  Tang;  what 
common  purposes  actually  kept  it  to- 
gether as  an  organization,  and  what  he 
thought  it  actually  meant  by  Sociahsm. 

"Well,  in  the  first  place,"  he  an- 
swered, "Kuo  Ming  Tang  means  the 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     125 

National  Party,  and  it  is  the  best  clue 
to  our  central  object  I  can  possibly  give 
you.  Abroad,  you  might  be  sure  that 
such  a  name  would  mean  jingoism,  or 
at  least  conservatism,  but  it  has  been 
characteristically  modern  China's  way 
to  take  that  name  for  the  most  radical 
party  in  the  country.  And  this  is  the 
reason.  Ever  since  Sun  Yat-sen  and 
Hwang  Hsing  founded  the  Tung  INIeng 
Hui  in  Tokio  in  1901,  Chinese  revolu- 
tionists have  always  recognized  it  was 
their  very  first  task  to  create  an  appeal 
which  would  break  down  provincial  and 
sectional  barriers  and  win  support  to  a 
common  rallying  cry  from  all  over  the 
country.  'Nationalism'  meant  then, 
and  means  now,  in  China,  a  real  step  in 
advance.  In  the  old  days  China  as  a 
nation  could  not  be  said  to  have  existed 
at  all.  In  practically  every  war  China 
fought  during  the  nineteenth  century 


126     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

you  will  find  troops  from  one  section  of 
the  country  helping  the  enemy  put  down 
rebellion  in  another. 

"Similarly,  it  was  only  through  the 
absence  of  the  slightest  glimmer  of  pa- 
triotism that  the  amazing  system  of 
provincial  government  grew  up  which 
has  made  our  officials  a  bye-word  the 
world  over  for  degrading  corruption 
and  self-interest.  These  officials  only 
had,  only  have  still,  for  the  Republic 
has  not  even  started  its  reform  in  their 
direction  yet,  the  interest  at  heart  of 
their  own  particular  province  or  district : 
and  favoritism  and  all  the  crooked  'in- 
fluences' which  determined  advance- 
ment have  almost  always  had  their  sanc- 
tion and  their  safety  from  exposure  in 
this  narrow  provincial  spirit. 

"Here  you  have  the  crux  of  all  our 
propaganda,  both  before  and  after  the 
Revolution, — the    rallying    cry    for    a 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     127 

united  China.  To  have  created  this 
idea  of  unity  and  to  have  aroused  the 
feehng  of  intense  nationahsm  that  you 
see  to-day — that  has  always  been  the 
first  object  of  our  party  and  it  is  the 
greatest  triumph  of  the  Chinese  Revolu- 
tion. 

"From  now  on  China  will  face  an 
entirely  different  set  of  problems.  In 
the  pell-mell  confusion  of  the  political 
situation  here  to-day,  one  thing  is  abso- 
lutely clear :  that  is  that  the  real  conflict 
in  China  will  never  again  be  a  racial  or 
provincial  conflict;  from  now  on  it  will 
be  between  the  class  interests  of  the 
whole  nation.  And  just  let  me  exi:>lain 
to  you  one  thing  in  particular  which  that 
change  means. 

"First  of  all,  it  means  that  China 
must  wake  up  with  a  bump  to  the  world- 
wide issue  of  Socialism  versus  Individ- 
ualism.    How  far  the  Kuo  Ming  Tang 


128     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

is  affected  by  Socialist  influences  you 
may  see  from  the  fact  that  as  many  as 
fifty  members  of  Parhament,  all  belong- 
ing to  our  party,  are  convinced  Social- 
ists. As  an  organization  the  Shueh 
Hwei  Tang,  as  the  Socialist  Party  is 
called  in  Chinese,  is  as  yet  one  of  the 
minor  influences  in  politics;  but  as  a 
permeating  force  the  prominent  Social- 
ists in  Parliament  and  out  have  swung 
the  Kuo  Ming  Tang  a  long  way  toward 
a  definite  Socialist  programme.  The 
nationalization  of  mines  and  railways, 
the  old  Tung  Meng  Hui  (Sun  Yat- 
sen's  original  party)  policy  of  the  social 
ownership  of  the  land,  democratic 
schemes  of  taxation,  such  as  the  income 
tax,  the  inheritance  tax,  etc.,  free  edu- 
cation, racial  equality,  and  lastly  the 
very  specific  wording  of  the  Kuo  Ming 
Tang  s  position  on  the  encouragement 
of  modern  industry  'on  a  social,  rather 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     129 

than  on  an  individualistic  basis,' — all 
these  are  significant  items  in  the  party's 
declared  and  published  pohcy  which 
show  a  more  than  accidental  drift  to- 
ward practical  Socialism. 

*'In  the  last  revision  of  the  Kuo  Ming 
Tang  constitution  you  will  find  Social- 
ism boldly  made  one  of  the  party's  main 
objectives,  for  number  four,  under 
'Final  Aims,'  reads : 

"  'To  prepare  the  way  for  the  intro- 
duction of  Socialism,  especially  in  order 
to  raise  the  national  standard  of  living, 
and  to  employ  the  powers  of  the  Gov- 
ernment quickly  and  evenly  to  develop 
the  resources  of  the  country  for  the  ben- 
efit of  the  whole  people/  " 

"We  could  n't  be  much  more  direct 
than  that,  could  we?"  said  Chang  Chi. 
"But  wait  a  minute.  Here  is  an  object 
lesson  right  before  you  of  the  way  the 
mind  of  our  party  is  working." 


130     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

A  meeting  had  begun  in  the  big  lec- 
ture room.  A  tall  young  Chinese  in  a 
European  suit  of  light  brown  silk  was 
speaking  from  the  platform,  under  the 
crossed  five-colored  flags.  He  spoke  in 
groups  of  queer,  ringing  monosyllables, 
full  of  uncouth  gutturals — good,  close- 
packed  Chinese  oratory  it  was,  for  sharp 
bursts  of  clapping  went  up  to  him  every 
minute  or  two  from  his  keen  attentive 
audience. 

"He  is  a  Socialist,"  said  Chang  Chi, 
"and  all  over  China  men  of  his  stamp 
are  talking  to  meetings  of  our  party. 
His  father  is  a  pawn-shop  keeper  in  a 
small  city  in  the  South,  but  he  laid  aside 
a  little  money  to  get  his  son  a  good  edu- 
cation in  Japan,  and  now,  as  in  the  old 
China  before  the  Manchus,  merit  and 
knowledge  put  him  on  an  equal  footing 
with  any  man  in  the  country.  We  have 
no  belted  earls  in  China;  our  people 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     131 

don't  know  the  meaning  of  aristocracy 
except  what  they  connect  with  the  for- 
eign rule  of  the  Manchus.  So  the  side 
of  Sociahsm  which  preaches  the  equahty 
of  all  men — the  cornerstone  of  the 
teachings  of  Confucius — will  never 
have  to  fight  for  its  life  as  it  has  to  do 
in  Europe — and  in  your  free  America, 
too. 

"Listen,  now;  you  may  hear  a  typical 
Kuo  Ming  Tang  argument:  for  the 
speaker  is  attacking  an  objection  to  So- 
cialism which  is  not  at  all  peculiar  to 
the  Chinese,  the  corruption  and  extor- 
tion of  the  State.  Just  let  me  give  you 
the  drift  of  what  he  is  saying. 

"He  is  saying  that  officials  are  a  poor 
lot  and  that  politicians  are  generally 
sons  of  the  devil."  (Cheers  from  said 
politicians  within  the  hall.)  "But 
within  the  past  two  years  officials  have 
taken  on  an  altogether  new  character  in 


132     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

China.  They  are  no  better  than  they 
were  before,  perhaps,  but  they  are  now 
no  longer  the  deputy  graft-receivers  of 
a  corrupt  tyranny — the  Revolution  has 
made  them  the  servants  of  the  people. 
It  is  for  the  people  to  realize  that  the 
step  on  which  they  are  now  entering" 
(they  are  talking  about  Sun  Yat-sen's 
Railway  Nationalization  scheme)  "faces 
them  with  two  alternatives :  either  to  risk 
a  little  corruption  from  men  who  are 
accountable  to  them  by  law;  or  to  get 
'ejfificient  management'  from  private  cu- 
pidity and  lay  the  cornerstone  of  indus- 
trial slavery  for  the  time  that  is  to  come. 
Will  it  be  easier  to  discharge  a  few  of- 
ficials or  to  shake  off  the  throttle-hold  of 
a  gigantic  trust?  And  what  about  the 
men  who  work  on  these  railways? 
Why  should  not  they  help  to  control 
them — and  keep  tabs  on  these  trouble- 
some officials  who  seem  to  be  causing  so 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     133 

much  worry?  If  you  take  the  less 
courageous  course,  this  is  the  penalty, 
he  is  saying — and  this  and  this ;  and  the 
facts  about  American  railway  conditions 
— wages,  fatal  accidents,  and  the  like — 
with  which  he  winds  up  his  argument 
come  pretty  near  clinching  his  case. 
You  know  them  better  than  I  do." 

The  young  man  in  brown  sat  down 
amid  a  long  burst  of  clapping  and  the 
meeting  became  general.  One  man 
after  another  spoke  to  the  question  with 
an  extraordinary  amount  of  readiness 
and  conviction,  but  no  vote  was  taken 
and  the  meeting  passed  on  to  a  general 
discussion  of  the  political  situation.  On 
this  topic,  although  everybody  was  on 
the  same  side  there  was  a  very  warm  dis- 
cussion indeed.  The  amount  of  hostil- 
ity to  the  opposing  party  and  to  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai  was  especially  noticeable,  and 
when  one  speaker  exclaimed  that  Yuan 


134    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

was  one  of  the  greatest  tyrants  the  coun- 
try had  ever  had,  there  was  a  fierce 
chorus  of  assent,  which  was  intensified 
tenfold  when  one  passionate  voice  called 
out,  "Who  killed  Sung  Chiao-jen?" 

•  ••••• 

''Well,  I  must  be  off,"  said  Chang 
Chi,  as  the  meeting  showed  signs  of 
drawing  to  a  close.  "I  have  enough  of 
this  political  situation  as  it  is.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  it  is  a  perfect  obsession. 
Everything  just  now  is  subservient  to 
politics  when  we  should  be  doing  noth- 
ing else  but  pulling  our  own  party  to- 
gether and  getting  ready  to  govern  the 
country.  All  the  tricks  of  Yuan  Shih- 
k'ai  in  Parliament  have  had  one  main 
object;  that  is,  to  set  the  parties  squab- 
bling among  themselves  so  bitterly  that 
they  would  look  ridiculous  in  the  eyes  of 
the  country — if  he  succeeds  in  making 
us  look  ridiculous  enough,  he  '11  soon 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     135 

sweep  away  our  little  freedom  like  a 
straw." 

Prophetic  words.  I  thought  of  them 
the  next  time  we  met,  in  a  little  apart- 
ment in  Tokio  where  he  was  hiding  with 
Sun  Yat-sen  six  short  months  later,  once 
more  a  conspirator  against  the  state. 

But  there  was  more  in  the  Kuo  Ming 
Tang  movement,  even  in  Peking  itself, 
than  the  conservative  reaction,  sweeping 
the  surface  of  politics,  can  ever  go  deep 
enough  to  destroy.  This  radicalism 
was  a  living  force,  and  its  roots  stay  be- 
low the  ground.  Take  another  of  its 
manifestations,  the  new  enthusiasm  for 
wide-spread  education.  Education  is 
the  currency  of  the  Chinese  people ;  and 
the  Revolution  being  spontaneously  and 
characteristically  Chinese,  proceeded  to 
supply  that  currency  with  its  typically 
unregulated  enthusiasm.  In  this  field 
the  Kuo  Ming  Tang,  with  its  extraor- 


136     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

dinary  mushroom  university,  set  the 
pace  in  Peking  as  well  as  throughout 
the  country.  At  the  time  when  I  vis- 
ited it,  the  Kuo  Ming  Tang  University 
stood  just  west  of  the  Chien  Men  gate, 
in  the  heart  of  the  official  quarter  of 
the  city.  It  was  an  institution  which 
had  to  be  seen  to  be  believed.  Three 
months  from  its  opening  it  had  thirteen 
hundred  students;  its  lecture  rooms 
were  jammed  to  the  doors;  its  quarters 
had  been  enlarged  twice;  it  still  had  a 
waiting  list  hundreds  long,  and  its 
teaching  staff  numbered  fifty  Chinese 
and  European  teachers. 

It  was  a  university  sprung  up  in  a 
night;  but  through  all  its  activities  you 
could  see  the  spirit  which  only  touches 
a  nation  in  great  moments  of  national 
regeneration  and  conscious  revolution. 
I  found  a  class  in  law  one  night  attend- 
ing lectures  after  nine  o'clock,  a  class 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     137 

150  strong,  but  listening  to  the  lecturer 
(he  was  a  French  ex-consular  agent) 
with  an  attention  which  all  the  Carnegie 
funds  cannot  procure  in  America. 
Work  began  at  seven  in  the  morning, 
and  ended  when  the  students  got  tired, 
for  optional  classes  continued  till  late  in 
the  evening. 

Students  came  to  this  university  from 
all  over  China,  mostly  from  the  South, 
and  almost  entirely  revolutionary  in 
sentiment.  The  fees  could  not  have 
been  more  democratic.  For  five  dollars 
a  month  you  could  live,  eat,  and  sleep 
"in,"  if  you  lived  "out,"  you  could  have 
all  the  courses  vou  wanted  for  three. 
The  courses  were  hastily  planned,  the 
curriculum  was  not  a  model  of  system, 
there  was  no  laboratory — for  that  is  one 
thing  you  can't  improvise  in  three 
months.  A  rule  limited  the  professors 
to  four  hours'  instruction  a  week,  so  as 


138     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

to  keep  the  range  of  tuition  as  wide  as 
possible;  foreign  teachers  were  paid 
twelve  dollars  a  week,  Chinese,  unless 
they  had  a  foreign  degree,  half  that  sum. 
On  the  efficiency  and  usefulness  of  an 
institution  like  this  it  was  very  hard  to 
form  a  judgment;  but  on  the  reality  of 
the  spirit  which  had  brought  it  into  ex- 
istence, you  could  not  help  seeing  the 
power  beneath  it,  a  power  for  national 
betterment  such  as  has  existed  in  recent 
times  in  no  other  country  in  the  world. 
A  particularly  significant  thing  was  the 
miscellaneous  character  of  its  students. 
Even  in  China,  where  education  has 
been  on  the  most  democratic  lines  pos- 
sible for  centuries,  and  coolies'  sons  fre- 
quently rubbed  shoulders  with  boys 
from  the  highest  families  in  the  land  at 
the  great  Examination  Halls, — even  in 
China  the  Kuo  Ming  Tang  students 
were  an  unprecedented  jumble.     I  saw 


PRESENT-DAY  CHIXA     139 

in  the  same  class-room  ex-revolutionary 
soldiers,  officials'  sons  and  shopkeepers' 
sons,  gray  headed  men  and  green  lads, 
boys  from  every  province  in  China,  and 
even  some  from  far-away  Mongolia. 
There  was  a  sprinkling  of  government 
officials,  and  a  great  mob  of  candidates 
for  office ;  there  were  boys  who  had  run 
away  from  home-to  get  their  first  taste 
of  freedom  in  a  republican  university, 
and  there  were  others  who  had  been 
taken  out  of  foreign-managed  schools 
and  sent  here  by  good  republican  pa- 
rents. In  short,  you  could  have  found 
thirteen  hundi-ed  reasons  for  the  pres- 
ence of  those  thirteen  hundred  students 
in  Peking. 

Such  was  the  training  ground  of  uto- 
pianism  and  radicalism  which  the  Kuo 
Ming  Tang  was  providing  during  the 
Revolution  for  the  future  leavening  of 
the  Ha-ta-men  streets  of  their  vast  and 


140     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

swarming  people.  The  consolidation 
which  could  have  taken  these  forces,  the 
undisciplined  political  parties,  the 
schools  thrown  up  in  scaffolding  alone, 
the  half-primed  batteries  of  the  hastily 
mobilised  press,  and  molded  them  to  a 
design  fitting  to  the  forces  behind  them 
would  have  made  a  radicalism  in  China 
which  would  have  endured  to  this  day. 
Sung  Chiao-jen,  the  man  more  capable 
of  making  that  consolidation  than  any 
other,  was  killed  as  he  was  starting  for 
Peking  to  take  the  work  actually  in 
hand.  This  murder  cuts  across  the 
whole  history  of  the  revolutionary  time. 
But  a  deeper  and  fairer  reason  is  that 
the  time  which  could  not  bring  out  its 
own  consolidation  was  not  really  ready 
to  take  hold  with  strong,  purposeful 
hands  of  the  sword  of  national  oppor- 
tunity which  was  so  nearly  in  its  grasp. 
Meanwhile,  the  sword  that  the  radi- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     141 

cals  let  slip  was  grasped  by  another 
hand.  Their  opportunity  made  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai  master  of  China.  Let  us  see 
in  the  next  chapter  what  his  mastery 
has  meant. 


LEADERSHIP   AND   YUAN   SHIH-K  AI 

WHEN  Li  Hung-chang  stood 
with  his  back  against  the  wall 
at  Shimonoseki,  striving  alone  to 
avert  the  crushing  humiliation  of  his 
nation  that  the  Japanese  diplomats  had 
cletermined  should  crown  their  victory 
in  the  war  of  1895,  he  uttered  this  pas- 
sionate protest,  a  protest  in  which  there 
rests  the  tragedy  of  a  people. 

"You  have  a  nation  at  your  back," 
he  exclaimed,  "a  united  nation  of  de- 
termined and  patriotic  people ;  but  what 
you  are  fighting  is  only  one  man!" 

It  was  a  vivid  picture  in  the  cunning 
old  diplomat's  mind — that  of  the  jeal- 

142 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     143 

ous  and  slothful  court  cliques  reviewing 
his  work  without  a  vestige  of  sympathy 
or  concern,  save  in  their  oa\ti  spiteful, 
eunuch-ridden  intrigues,  disdaining  in 
the  foreigner,  even  in  the  hour  of  their 
humiliation,  nothing  so  much  as  his 
jDower  and  his  unity  of  purpose. 

Under  such  a  government  leadership 
was  impossible,  and  mutual  confidence 
between  a  leader  and  his  people  gro- 
tesquely so.  Li  Hung-chang,  through 
all  his  years  of  seeming  power,  never 
attained  such  a  leadership,  never  even 
anticipated  it.  In  his  day  the  Chinese 
people  were  an  entity  unrealizable  to 
the  mind. 

The  Chinese  people  over  whom  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai  is  dictator  to-day  have  under- 
gone a  powerful  change.  Yuan  has 
lived  the  life  of  the  old-time  official ;  he 
carries  with  him  the  old-time  cynicism 
and  obliqueness  of  policy;  he  has  been 


144    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

trained  throughout  his  Hfe  in  the  old 
school.  But  he  is  confronted  not 
merely  with  a  people,  but  with  a  nation, 
and  with  a  nation  that  is  coming  more 
rapidly  than  the  mind  can  follow  to  a 
consolidation  of  structure  and  to  an  in- 
tensified sense  of  common  purpose. 

The  essential  point  to  understand 
about  his  past  is  that  he  is  rooted  in  the 
same  rigid  traditions  which  the  Chinese 
Revolution  rose  to  overthrow.  And 
the  marvel  of  his  present  position  is  the 
elasticity  with  which  he  has  adapted  him- 
self to  the  change.  To  a  certain  extent 
he  has  trimmed  the  new  order  to  suit 
himself,  but  no  man  could  have  sur- 
vived in  his  place  who  did  not  yield 
vast  concessions  of  the  old  order  in  an 
instinctive  grasp  of  the  demands  of  the 
new.  True,  place  and  power  lay  that 
way;  but  it  is  an  error  of  the  Radicals 
to  suppose  that  some  mysterious  power 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     145 

guides  a  man  dominant  in  his  time  in 
the  direction  of  his  own  self-interest. 
Only  an  infinite  subtlety  of  adaptation 
and  intelligent  compromise  could  have 
raised  this  blunt,  unmoral  character, 
steeped  in  the  strateg}^  of  the  old  school, 
to  the  dominant  position  he  now  holds 
in  the  new. 

Yuan  rose  to  preeminence  as  the 
universally  accepted  successor  to  Li 
Hung-chang  during  the  constructive 
period  of  JNIanchu  statesmanship  in 
which  the  old  Dowager  Empress  ably 
and  sincerely  did  her  best  to  wipe  out 
the  days  of  the  shame  of  the  Boxers. 
In  the  alteration  of  China  to  a  different 
standard  of  leadership  her  impressive 
decrees  between  1902  and  1908  con- 
tributed immeasurably  to  the  rising  de- 
mand for  a  government  worthy  of  the 
Chinese  people.  It  is  the  achievements 
and  standards  of  those  days  which,  more 


146     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

than  any  other  influence,  gave  us  the 
key  to  Yuan  Shih-k'ai's  preeminence. 

The  first  great  landmark  of  these  re- 
forms was  the  decree  removing  the  ban 
of  three  centuries  on  marriages  between 
Manchus  and  Chinese,  and,  incidentally, 
anticipating  the  revolutionary  order  of 
to-day  by  making  optional  the  wearing 
of  the  queue,  with  which  the  Manchu 
had  branded  the  Chinese  as  a  conquered 
race.  There  followed  in  rapid  succes- 
sion the  decree  introducing  Western 
learning  and  disestablishing  the  ancient 
scholarship,  which  an  American  scholar 
has  called  the  gi'eatest  intellectual 
change  in  the  history  of  mankind,  the 
decree  extending  education  to  women, 
the  decree  reorganizing  the  army  on  a 
modern  plan,  and  consolidating  on  lines 
looking  toward  constitutional  govern- 
ment the  executive  departments  of 
Peking,  and  finally  the  great  edict  of 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     147 

1906,  accepting  the  principle  of  consti- 
tutionalism, and  formulating  the  steps 
in  which  something  new  was  to  be 
granted  each  year,  in  order  that  China 
might  in  nine  years  time  attain  the  basis 
of  a  parliamentary  government.  An 
integral  part  of  this  movement  was  also 
the  decree  against  opium,  which  should 
run  its  course  next  year ;  a  decree,  which 
more  than  any  other  single  reform,  has 
revealed  to  the  world  the  moral  fervor 
which  is  behind  the  regeneration  of  the 
Chinese  people. 

During  these  years  Yuan  Shih-k'ai,  as 
governor  of  the  metropolitan  province 
of  Chihh,  and  later  as  president  of  the 
Waiwupu,  or  Foreign  Office,  headship 
of  which  tacitly  amounted  to  being 
prime  minister,  was  in  part  the  brains 
and  wholly  the  arm  and  shield  of  the 
administration.  The  model  army  then 
organized  was  his  army,  and  his  army 


148     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

it  has  always  been.  He  organized  it 
first  at  Tientsin,  and  it  was  at  Tientsin 
where  as  governor  of  ChihU  he  gave 
China  her  first  example  of  model  munic- 
ipal government.  He  it  was  who 
worked  out  the  details  of  the  other  re- 
forms, he  it  was  who  planned  that  be- 
fore the  ultimate  Parliament  in  Peking, 
provincial  parliaments  in  eighteen  pro- 
vincial capitals  should  be  preparing 
and  educating  the  mind  of  the  people  for 
the  larger  pattern  of  representative 
government  to  come. 

The  importance  of  this  period  should 
not  be  overestimated.  The  edicts  were 
regarded  by  the  Chinese  people  more 
as  promises  than  as  laws,  and  promises 
which  they  showed  in  1911  they  were 
very  far  from  believing.  But  even  as 
promises,  they  were  founded  on  the 
deepest  currents  of  public  feeling  the 
Chinese   people  had  yet   experienced. 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     149 

They  coincided  with  a  new  national 
determination  on  the  part  of  China 
to  maintain  her  sovereignty  against 
foreign  exploitation.  It  is  this  period, 
to  which  foreign  railwaj^  promoters  re- 
fer as  "the  era  of  public  opinion,"  in 
which  China  first  made  headway  against 
the  calculated  sovereignty  of  foreign 
powers  over  the  railways  they  were  con- 
structing within  her  borders.  It  was  a 
formative,  germinating  period.  And 
the  moral  ideas  which  were  at  the  base 
of  most  of  what  reflection  it  had  in  the 
minds  of  the  people  were  fittingly  ex- 
pressed by  the  last  great  edict  of  the 
Manchus,  which  abolished  on  February 
22,  1910  the  practice  of  slavery  and  the 
buying  and  selling  of  human  beings  in 
China. 

This  was  not  a  time  for  leadership, 
because  the  Chinese  people  were  still  far 
from   being   either   in   pretense   or   in 


150     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

reality  active  participants  in  the  reforms 
generated  from  Peking.  It  was  a 
period  for  strategy;  and  Yuan  Shih- 
k*ai  proved  himself  then  the  supreme 
strategist  of  his  day.  Its  defect,  in 
which  he  deeply  shared,  was  that  it 
preserved  the  old  jealousies  and  the  old 
disunities  which  still  kept  alive  in  China 
and  out  an  active  and  irreconcilable 
body  of  adversaries  to  the  State.  The 
Dowager  Empress's  desire  to  govern 
liberally  ceased  abruptly  where  it 
crossed  past  jealousies  and  unforgiven 
injuries  to  her  personal  pride.  It  is  an 
indelible  blot  on  her  and  on  Yuan  Shih- 
k'ai's  statesmanship  that  the  two  univer- 
sally esteemed  leaders  of  the  reform 
movement  of  1898,  Kang  Yu-wei  and 
Liang  Chi-ch'iao,  were  not  recalled 
from  their  exile  in  Tokio  to  the  service 
of  their  country.  The  narrowness  of 
the   governing   clique   was    still   more 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     151 

manifest  in  the  ruthless  war  of  exter- 
mination it  maintained  against  the 
more  radical  leaders,  in  the  price  on 
Sun  Yat-sen's  head,  in  the  murderous 
attempt  it  made  to  kidnap  him  in  Lon- 
don and  bring  him  home  to  certain 
death,  from  which  his  friend.  Dr.  Cant- 
lie,  saved  him  by  the  narrowest  of  mar- 
gins, and  in  the  gradual  alienation  of 
practically  the  whole  merchant  and 
student  population  abroad  and  the 
"Young  China"  politicals  and  intellec- 
tuals at  home. 

With  the  death  of  the  Dowager  Em- 
press in  1908,  the  vigor  and  courage  of 
the  Manchu  domination  disappeared, 
and  the  career  of  triumphant  ineptitude 
began  which  ended  in  1911,  as  it  richly 
deserved  to  end.  Yuan  Shih-k'ai  was 
humiliated  and  dismissed,  and  the  part 
of  Mirabeau,  which  he  might  have 
played    successfully,    with    his    robust 


152     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

health  and  assured  span  of  life,  dis- 
appeared from  the  cast  altogether. 
Prince  Chun,  his  sworn  enemy,  became 
regent,  and  Prince  Ching,  no  less  bitter 
a  foe  to  constitutionalism  and  reform, 
was  the  choice  of  the  Manchu  party  for 
premier.  To  redeem  the  Dowager- 
Empress's  grandiose  plans  for  a  na- 
tional Parliament  with  a  body  presided 
over  by  Prince  Ching  was  to  follow  with 
the  uncanny  faithfulness  of  history  the 
matter  in  which  Louis  of  France  played 
with  the  great,  thirsty  spirit  of  his  time 
in  his  exasperating  harlequinade  over 
the  States-General.  The  floods  came, 
the  house  fell,  and  Yuan  Shih-k'ai 
stepped  in  between  the  two  factions  and 
seized  the  empty  throne. 

I  have  told  how  neither  in  military 
strength  nor  in  party  unity  were  the 
Revolutionists  able  to  make  good  their 
victory.     There    was    another    factor. 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     153 

Yuan  had  the  confidence  of  the  powers. 
It  is  an  open  secret  that  Wu  Ting-fang, 
who  was  for  the  first  few  months  act- 
ing foreign  minister  for  the  Revolution- 
ists, only  prevented  several  major 
European  powers  from  lending  their 
full  support  towards  crushing  the  Rev- 
olution bj^  threatening  a  boycott  of  for- 
eign goods  throughout  Southern  China. 
And  as  support  in  this  case  meant 
money,  which  would  have  to  be  supplied 
by  the  very  banks  who  would  lose  most 
heavily  by  the  boycott,  it  was  not  forth- 
coming. 

If  there  is  one  thing  more  irrelevant 
than  another  in  considering  the  charac- 
ter of  a  man  like  Yuan  Shih-k'ai,  it  is 
endeavoring  to  follow  his  motives.  One 
instance,  the  instance  of  his  betrayal  of 
the  Reformers  of  1898  into  the  hands 
of  the  Dowager  Empress,  is  sufficient 
to   show   the   hopelessness    of   such    a 


154     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

method.  The  young  reformer-emperor 
ordered  him  to  seize  the  person  of  the 
Dowager  Empress  and  put  to  death  her 
minister,  Jung  Lu.  Instead,  Yuan 
placed  the  "Old  Buddha"  and  her  re- 
actionary following  once  more  in  au- 
thority and  allowed  them  to  crush  out 
the  reform  movement  of  the  "Hundred 
Days"  in  the  tide  of  jingoism  which 
ended  two  years  later  in  the  Boxer 
tragedy.  The  Revolutionists  believe 
that  by  his  action  Yuan  is  more  respon- 
sible than  any  other  man  for  that 
tragedy.  He  held  the  key  to  the  whole 
situation,  the  army.  His  motives  for 
throwing  the  balance  one  way  or  the 
other  have  been  exhaustively  thrashed 
out  during  the  past  eighteen  years  in  a 
hundred  different  lights ;  and  there  is  as 
much  disagreement  as  ever.  The  es- 
sential fact  remains,  however — the  es- 
sential Oriental  fact  of  the  situation — 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     155 

that  Yuan  did  throw  in  his  lot  with  the 
stronger  faction.  No  Chinese  official 
of  his  time  and  training  could  be  ex- 
pected to  do  differently.  It  was  given 
to  Yuan's  strategic  genius  to  see  the 
stronger  faction;  and  it  is  this  discern- 
ment, and  his  boldness  in  acting  upon 
it,  that  more  than  anything  else  explains 
how  he  has  come  to  be  where  he  is  to- 
day. 

Yuan  came  into  the  power,  then,  and 
he  assumed  it,  not  by  virtue  of  his 
leadership,  because  he  has  never  of  his 
own  accord  given  the  country  a  popular 
lead  in  anything,  but  by  virtue  of  the 
genius  that  is  instinctively  his,  the 
grand  strategy  of  the  old  Chinese  of- 
ficial. He  found  the  literate  classes  of 
the  Chinese  people  clamoring  for  the 
first  time  in  their  history  that  they  be 
treated  as  a  nation.  He  declared  for 
the  Repubhc,  and  beat  down  the  last 


156     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

vestige  of  Manchu  resistance  by  getting 
all  his  generals — and  many  of  theirs — 
to  declare  for  it  too.  Then  he  obtained 
from  the  IManchus,  by  a  superb  stroke 
of  generalship,  the  famous  edict  order- 
ing hi7?i  to  establish  the  Republic.  He 
won  over  the  Southern  leaders,  notably 
Sun  Yat-sen,  by  promising  them  a 
parliament  and  a  cabinet  in  which  they 
would  presumably  have  the  major  share. 
But  he  never  let  go  one  single  vestige 
of  the  real  power  of  his  position;  as 
military  chief,  as  administrative  head, 
and  as  the  sole  repository  of  foreign 
confidence  he  remained,  as  he  intended 
to  remain,  supreme.  Little  by  little,  he 
drew  the  moderates  round  him  and  iso- 
lated the  radicals.  We  saw  the  out- 
come of  his  strategy  when  we  traced  in 
the  first  chapter  the  downfall  of  the 
imaginative  inspiration  of  the  Revolu- 
tionary parties.     There  was  only  one 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     157 

interlude  in  that  downfall  when  it 
seemed  as  if  the  Southern  leaders  might 
at  last  make  headway.  That  was  when 
America,  after  withdrawing  from  the 
Six  Power  Loan,  recognized  the 
Chinese  Republic  in  April,  1913.  With 
real  insight  and  courage,  President 
Wilson  attached  to  his  recognition  the 
proviso  that  the  government  he  recog- 
nized must  be  equally  satisfactory  to 
the  Kuo  Ming  Tang  leaders  of  the 
South,  who  were  then  in  acknowledged 
control  of  both  houses  of  Parliament. 
But  hardly  had  this  assurance  been 
received  than  Yuan  obtained  a  testi- 
monj^  to  his  own  dominant  position  that 
overwhelmed  altogether  the  good- 
natured  friendliness  of  America  toward 
the  Republican  leaders.  This  was  the 
Great  Loan,  which  fell  like  a  bomb- 
shell on  China  on  the  night  of  April 
26-27.     In  its  relation  to  the  leadership 


158     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

of  Yuan  Shih-k'ai,  the  meaning  of  this 
loan  is  impressive.  It  meant  that  the 
European  bankers  participating  in  it 
were  wilHng  to  stake  everything,  not  on 
the  constitutional  institutions  which 
were  supposed  to  embody  China's  Re- 
pubHcan  government,  but  on  the  se- 
curity and  reliable  headship  of  one  man. 
Then  and  there  Europe  abandoned 
Parliament  and  the  Revolution  in  China 
to  their  fate,  and  bet  on  a  man ;  and  the 
man  was  Yuan  Shih-k'ai. 

Armed  with  this  power,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  President  proceeded  to  com- 
plete the  isolation  of  the  leaders  of  the 
First  Revolution,  and  after  beating 
down  their  futile  opposition  in  the  cam- 
paign of  the  summer  and  fall  of  1913, 
he  outlawed  their  parties,  drove  their 
leaders  out  of  the  country,  destroyed 
their  Parliament  in  Peking  as  well  as 
the  Assemblies  in  the  provincial  capi- 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     159 

tals,  suppressed  their  newspapers,  and 
on  October  10,  the  anniversary  of  the 
First  Revolution  he  had  so  thoroughly 
discredited,  had  himself  inaugurated  as 
Permanent  President  in  Peking. 

Out  of  the  reaction  that  followed 
this  period,  there  emerged  one  essential 
fact,  that  it  was  now  necessary  to  give 
China,  after  more  than  two  years  of 
bitter  faction  struggles,  a  government 
that  consolidated  in  some  fashion  or 
other  the  new  requirements  of  the  situa- 
tion. The  first  and  principal  require- 
ment of  the  situation  was  that  the  peo- 
ple expected  a  government  that  would 
be  controlled  by  no  clique  or  party  or 
section,  but  would  be  entirely  national. 
In  other  words,  national  government  in 
China  had  its  first  chance  in  the  year 
1914.  How  this  opportunity  has  been 
met  I  describe  in  part  in  the  next  chap- 
ter ;  as  for  the  part  in  it  played  by  Yuan 


160     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Shih-k'ai,  even  his  enemies  could  not 
deny  that  for  more  than  a  year  he 
was  the  effective  nucleus  of  the 
most  progressive  and  successful  ad- 
ministration China  has  ever  had.  Par- 
ticularly during  1914  and  the  early 
months  of  1915,  when  the  Euro- 
pean war  and  the  iinpasse  with  Japan 
harassed  China  with  the  burden  of  a 
double  crisis,  the  new  government  bore 
up  under  the  strain  magnificently,  and 
the  whole  world  admitted  that  the 
Chinese  people  had  never  faced  a  na- 
tional crisis  with  a  deeper  sense  of 
solidarity  and  patriotic  fortitude. 

On  top  of  this  genuine  proof  of  in- 
ternal unification,  however,  there  has 
come  another  far-reaching  issue,  on 
which  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the 
grand  strategy  of  the  President  is  go- 
ing to  have  its  ultimate  and  final  test. 
That  is  the  Monarchy  Restoration  is- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     161 

sue.  During  the  fall  and  winter  of  last 
year  the  agitation  for  a  constitutional 
monarchy  which  had  long  been  smol- 
dering, suddenly  burst  out  and  began 
to  burn  briskly  throughout  the  country. 
Its  patron  society  was  the  Chou-an 
Hwei,  or,  as  it  may  be  innocently 
translated,  the  Peace  Promotion 
Society.  The  head  of  this  society  was 
Mr.  Yang  Tu,  a  man  who  provided  an 
exceptional  medium  for  compromise  be- 
tween various  political  groups  in  China. 
Yang  Tu  was  a  subordinate  lieutenant 
of  Kang  Yu-wei  and  Liang  Chi-ch'iao 
in  the  Hundred  Days  of  Reform  in 
'98;  and  like  his  tutors  had  to  flee  for 
his  life  before  the  swift  revenge  of  the 
Dowager  Empress.  Later,  when  that 
ingenious  old  lady  found  it  necessary 
to  conciliate  some  of  the  constitutional 
leaders,  she  picked  out  Yang  Tu  as  one 
of  the  objects  of  her  tardy  favor.     He 


162     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

returned  to  Peking  as  a  JNIanchu  official, 
and  became  in  time  an  active  apologist, 
so  many  Chinese  officials  of  the  time 
assert,  of  the  Manchu  regime.  He 
achieved  another  political  transforma- 
tion when,  with  the  coming  of  the  Rev- 
olution, he  abandoned  the  JNIanchus 
and  became  a  strong  partizan  of  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai. 

To  this  popular  agitation  of  presum- 
ably non-partizan  appeal  there  was  soon 
added  an  impressive  sanction  by  a  for- 
eign scholar,  none  other  than  Dr.  Frank 
Goodnow,  president  of  Jolins  Hopkins 
University,  and  American  advisor 
on  constitutional  affairs  to  the  Chi- 
nese Republic.  Dr.  Goodnow's  well- 
known  memorandum  advising  China  to 
become  a  monarchy,  with  the  ostenta- 
tious disinterestedness  of  its  American 
origin  behind  it,  had,  and  was  meant  to 
have,  a  powerful  effect  on  the  Chinese 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     163 

mind.  It  precipitated  the  subject  into 
the  arena  of  practical  pohtics;  and  in 
spite  of  the  seemingly  earnest  refusal 
of  Yuan  Shih-k'ai  even  to  consider  the 
offer,  the  movement  spread  with  ex- 
traordinary rapidity  throughout  the 
country. 

Dr.  Goodnow's  memorandum  was 
published  in  the  summer  of  1915 — on 
August  20,  to  be  exact — and  within  four 
months — by  December  15 — China  was 
committed  to  a  monarchy.  Thus 
promptly  are  little  matters  like  changes 
in  the  form  of  government  effected  in 
modern  China.  Yuan  refused,  refused 
again,  and  finally  consented  to  become 
Emperor.  The  form  of  his  choosing 
was  a  repubhcan  form,  but  his  military 
powers  and  his  administrative  autoc- 
racy controlled  the  issue  from  the  begin- 
ning. We  read  of  primaries,  of  repre- 
sentative bodies  of  voters,  of  a  plebiscite 


164     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

of  "good"  citizens,  and  of  democratic 
machinery  without  end,  little  of  which 
was  ever  known,  or  ever  will  be  known, 
in  any  constitutional  country.  But  the 
artifice  and  strategy  of  old  China  found 
it  the  means  to  its  end,  and  justified  its 
use  by  success. 

How  complete  this  success  was  we 
can  vividly  see  in  the  dramatic  happen- 
ings of  the  12th  and  13th  of  last  Decem- 
ber in  Peking.  Citizens'  representative 
conferences  including  1834  representa- 
tives of  the  people  elected  at  "prima- 
ries" held  in  all  the  provincial  capitals, 
as  well  as  in  a  number  of  other  centers 
of  population,  had  gathered  in  the 
national  capital.  The  results  of  their 
election  were  a  striking  tribute  to  the 
convincing  "arguments"  of  the  mon- 
archist party.  For  this  is  what  the 
Council  of  State  had  to  report  to  the 
President  on  the  12th  of  December: 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     165 

"That  the  Council  yesterday  made  a 
final  examination  of  the  votes  of  the 
Citizens'  Representative  Conference, 
all  of  which  were  fomid  to  be  in  favor 
of  the  establishment  of  a  constitutional 
monarchy,  with  His  Excellency  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai  as  first  emperor.  The  Coun- 
cil of  State  therefore  requests  H.  E. 
Yuan  Shih-k'ai  to  obey  the  true  will  of 
the  people,  and  to  ascend  the  throne.'' 

In  reply  to  this  earnest  despatch 
Yuan  refused  to  accept  the  throne  ow- 
ing to  the  oaths  taken  at  his  formal 
inauguration  as  First  President  of  the 
Republic,  and  also  because  his  ability 
did  not  fit  him  for  the  important  and 
exalted  position  offered  him  by  the 
Citizens'  Representative  Committee. 
Hence  he  requested  the  Council  of 
State  to  select  some  one  else  more 
capable  and  worthy  to  occupy  the  Im- 
perial Throne. 


166     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Thereupon  the  Council  of  State  con- 
vened another  meeting  and  forwarded 
a  second  despatch  urging  Yuan — etc., 
etc. 

Let  us  skip  these  supplications,  and 
come  to  the  next  day,  when  this  laconic 
despatch  of  the  13th  December  reveals- 
Yuan's  final  attitude  toward  the  "pol- 
ished perturbation,  golden  care"  that 
was  offered  to  him  in  the  Imperial  pur- 
ple. "President  Yuan  Shih-k'ai,"  it 
runs,  "in  reply  to  the  second  despatch 
forwarded  by  the  Council  of  State,  con- 
sents to  become  emperor  on  condition 
that  the  form  of  government  is  not 
changed  till  next  year.  He  realizes 
that  the  step  he  has  taken  in  accepting 
the  throne  of  China  might  prove  dis- 
astrous to  his  family,  but  he  loves  his 
country,  and  is  prepared  to  make  any 
sacrifice  for  it.  Consequently  he  bows 
to  the  will  of  the  people." 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     167 

Thus  entered  the  monarchy — but  not 
officially.  Yuan's  first  move  as  titular 
sovereign  was  worthy  of  his  genius.  It 
was  to  postpone  the  inauguration  of  the 
new  regime  until  the  new  year.  The 
new  year  came — and  with  it  a  formi- 
dable rebellion  in  the  great  southwest- 
ern province  of  Yunnan.  Very  well, 
he  postponed  the  inauguration  "indefi- 
nitely." There  it  rests  to-day;  the  op- 
portunity of  the  Chinese  people  again 
to  become  "chen"  (subjects) ,  to  kowtow 
before  Imperial  dignity,  as  well  as  be- 
fore the  half  a  score  of  lesser  grades  of 
nobility  it  is  Yuan's  gracious  purpose 
to  create  for  their  joy  and  adulation — 
this  opportunity  is  still  an  unfulfilled 
promise. 

It  will  be  better  for  them  if  it  is  never 
realized.  For  however  good  a  govern- 
ment some  future  monarchy  may  give 
China,  the  present  monarchy  agitation 


168     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

was  conceived  in  an  ambitious  oppor- 
tunism of  which  Dr.  Goodnow  was 
merely  the  successful  cat's-paw,  and  car- 
ried to  its  present  triumph  mainly 
through  the  unscrupulous  intrigues  of 
a  court  camarilla  wholly  insignificant  in 
its  popular  representation. 

The  first  and  most  final  thing  that 
can  be  said  against  the  whole  coup  is 
that  it  is  a  senseless  diversion  of  China's 
patriotic  energy  at  a  time  when  the  very 
existence  of  the  nation  is  threatened  as 
never  before.  Dr.  Goodnow  expressed 
the  view  of  many  apologists  of  the  mon- 
archy in  his  argument  that  it  was  neces- 
sary for  the  safety  of  the  state  that  the 
chief  executive  have  ample  power. 
Very  well;  he  has.  Not  only  will  a 
monarchy  give  Yuan  no  more  real 
power  than  he  possesses  to-day,  but  it 
will  upset  that  compromise  between  the 
North  and  the  South  of  which  the  form 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     169 

of  the  Republic  was  a  very  visible  as- 
surance. In  all  political  situations 
names  have  an  infinite  conjuring  power. 
The  Republic  of  China  represents  to 
thousands  of  liberal  Chinese  a  great  bid 
for  national  liberty;  they  reahze  with  a 
perfectly  rational  instinct  that  it  has 
given  them  standing  and  sympathetic 
appreciation  throughout  the  world. 
It  has  proved  a  rallying  ground  for  na- 
tional unity  before;  it  could  prove  so 
again.  If  Yuan  is  indispensable  (a 
rather  humiliating  thought  for  China), 
a  dead  Emperor,  with  rivals  contending 
for  the  prize  of  a  throne,  would  be  no 
better  than  a  dead  President,  with  a 
successor  to  be  elected  with  at  least  the 
pretense  of  popular  choice.  The  issue 
is  a  false  one ;  it  should  be  between  con- 
stitutionalism and  autocracy,  between 
progress  and  reaction,  between  a  na- 
tional government  and  a  ruling  clique. 


170     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

That  is  the  problem  China  has  got  to 
work  out,  and  nothing  obscures  it  more 
completely  than  the  injection,  at  this 
time  of  all  times,  of  insincere  and  dis- 
turbing historical  analogy,  the  baring 
of  self-interest,  and  the  unloosening  of 
jealousy,  suspicion,  and  spreading  civil 
discord  which  has  followed  the  mon- 
archy agitation. 

There  is  but  one  other  principle  to 
state ;  and  that  is  that  the  Chinese  wor- 
ship of  monarchical  institutions,  for  all 
its  centuries,  is  largely  an  illusion  for 
foreign  consumption.  The  Chinese 
have  not  even  had  a  nobility,  and  their 
local  government,  which  has  been  until 
recently  the  only  government  the  peo- 
ple have  felt,  has  been  essentially  demo- 
cratic, even  communistic  in  character. 
Now  the  people  are  feeling  the  national 
government  for  the  first  time  in  their 
history;  indeed,  one  could  almost  say 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     171 

that  government  on  a  national  scale  has 
only  been  introduced  into  China  within 
the  past  few  years.  Their  attitude 
toward  monarchy  and  all  its  trappings 
was  admirably  expressed  in  the  intense 
feeling  of  relief  that  followed  the  fu- 
nerals of  the  Dowager  Empress  and  the 
Emperor  in  1909;  with  the  great  lit- 
erate public  opinion  of  China,  particu- 
larly that  south  of  the  Yang-tse  River, 
that  was  the  funeral-year  of  respect  for 
the  monarchy.  The  whole  nation  has 
felt  since  then  a  lessening  in  the  load  of 
national  humihation,  and  the  point  that 
this  has  occurred  under  a  Republic  has 
not  been  missed.  Dr.  Goodnow  quali- 
fied his  memorandum  at  many  angles, 
but  he  did  not  forbear  to  insult  the  pride 
of  China  deeply  on  this  particular  point 
— that  they  could  not  understand  an 
idea  for  national  government  that  they 
had  administered  for  centuries  as  local 


172     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

government.  He  compared  them  with 
Mexico,  with  Ecuador,  with  the  Crom- 
weUian  Commonwealth;  and  the  appli- 
cation to  their  present  condition  of  com- 
parisons with  Villa  and  his  Yaquis,  with 
the  mob  anarchies  of  Quito,  and  the  ex- 
cesses of  our  own  witch-burning  ances- 
tors in  the  days  when  a  Drogheda  mas- 
sacre was  merely  an  episode,  did  not  ex- 
actly fill  with  sweet  reasonableness  the 
breasts  of  Chinese  Republicans. 

Indeed,  that  an  American  could  think 
of  investing  his  country's  prestige  in 
China  in  advice  depending  on  analo- 
gies such  as  these  has  filled  responsible 
leaders  of  modern  China  with  conster- 
nation. I  am  not  forgetting  that  Dr. 
Goodnow  qualified  his  advice  with  many 
virtuous  assertions,  among  them  that 
no  change  from  republic  to  monarchy 
should  be  considered  (1)  should  the 
foreign  powers  oppose  it,   (2)    should 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     173 

the  Chinese  people  rise  in  rebelHon 
against  the  change,  (3)  should  any 
doubt  exist  about  the  law  of  succession, 
and  (4)  should  the  new  Government  be 
less  likely  to  provide  for  the  just  devel- 
opment of  constitutional  government. 
These  are  excellent  academic  theses,  but 
Dr.  Goodnow  has  yet  to  learn  that  when 
you  are  dealing  with  a  nation  in  the 
stress  of  constitutional  upheaval,  your 
flat  statement  counts  for  one  hundred 
per  cent,  and  your  qualifications  count 
for  nil.  An  American  came  out  against 
the  Chinese  Republic — that  is  the  con- 
sj^icuous  shame  of  it — for  when  the  mon- 
archy restoration  societies  got  down  se- 
riously to  the  task  of  spreading  his 
Memorandum  over  the  country,  these 
qualifications  disappeared  like  chaff. 
The  fact  that  Dr.  Goodnow  thought 
that  China  might  be  more  likely  to  get 
constitutional  government  under  a  mon- 


174     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

archy  is  of  no  practical  consequence  be- 
side the  kind  of  monarchy  for  which  his 
advice  helped  to  make  smooth  the  path ; 
nor  does  it  excuse  the  amazing  ineptness 
of  changing  horses  on  a  matter  of  or- 
ganic government  in  the  mid-stream  of 
China's  perplexities  to  maintain  the 
substance  of  independence  itself. 

I  am  not  here  giving  simply  the  de- 
tached opinion  of  a  foreign  observer;  I 
am  stating  what  any  student  of  the  mat- 
ter can  find  out  for  himself  is  the  firm 
conviction  of  a  very  formidable  element 
of  China's  pohtical  leadership.  Take 
the  men,  for  instance,  who  have  been 
throughout  the  closest  and  most  con- 
structive sympathizers  with  Yuan's  pol- 
icies in  the  immediate  past.  Take  the 
foremost  political  and  constitutional 
leader  in  China  to-day — Liang  Chi- 
ch'iao — what  does  this  veteran  constitu- 
tional monarchist  think  of  the  monarchy 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     175 

proposed  under  these  circumstances? 
Liang,  Minister  of  Justice  under  Yuan 
till  a  few  months  ago,  opponent  of  the 
Revolution  because  he  stoutly  held  that 
a  limited  monarchy  was  then  far  prefer- 
able to  the  Republic,  deep  student  and 
nationally  respected  leader  that  he  is, 
has  used  all  the  logic  and  eloquence  of 
his  tireless  pen  ever  since  the  present 
monarchy  agitation  began — to  help  it 
to  realize  his  own  recent  monarchical 
ideas?  No,  to  attack  it  as  the  greatest 
peril  China  is  facing  to-day.  Listen  to 
this : 

"It  is  a  constitution  that  we  need  to 
ensure  domestic  solidarity;  and  the 
President  knows  that  no  change  in  the 
form  of  Government  which  tears  up  the 
obligation  to  stand  by  the  Republic  is  a 
step  in  the  direction  of  constitutional- 
ism. Every  well  informed  person 
knows  that  the  monarchist  agitation  is 


176    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

nothing  more  than  the  plot  of  a  miHtary 
camarilla." 

It  is  worth  noting  that  Yuan  repeated 
this  obligation  as  late  as  September  6 
of  last  year,  when  he  wi'ote  to  the  Grand 
Council  (Tsangcheng  Yuan)  as  fol- 
lows : 

"It  is  now  four  years  since  I  was  en- 
trusted by  the  people  with  the  office  of 
the  presidency  of  the  Republic.  .  .  . 
It  is  my  special  duty  to  maintain 
the  Republic  as  the  form  of  govern- 
ment." 

As  the  signs  increased  that  Yuan  re- 
garded this  pledge  as  a  "scrap  of  pa- 
per," Liang  Chi-ch'iao  did  the  only  pos- 
sible thing — he  resigned  from  office  and 
left  Peking.  Is  he  the  only  national 
statesman  and  former  supporter  who 
has  done  this?  The  answer  to  this 
question  is  the  key  to  current  Chinese 
politics. 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     177 

Distinctly,  he  is  not.  A  list  of  the 
resignations  during  the  past  few  months 
of  Chinese  high  in  public  life  reveals  a 
condition  of  affairs  wholly  unsuspected 
by  those  who  think  the  Chinese  are  re- 
ceiving the  monarchy  kindly,  or  even 
with  indifference.  Liang  resigned  on 
the  3rd  of  October.  On  the  4th,  Hsu 
Shih-chang  resigned  as  Secretary  of 
State.  Hsu  Shih-chang  is  a  conserva- 
tive of  the  conservatives — guardian  to 
the  Emperor,  former  premier,  old-time 
official  under  the  Manchus,  he  was  one 
of  the  bulwarks  of  Yuan's  government ; 
yet  he  resigned  like  any  Jacobin  at  the 
fii'st  sniff  of  the  monarchy.  On  the  3rd 
of  October  Li  Yuan-hung,  vice-presi- 
dent of  sorts  and  chairman  of  the  Grand 
Council,  was  absent  from  a  very  im- 
portant session.  He  has  not  attended 
since.  On  New  Year's  Day  he  was  of- 
fered the  title  of  Prince.     He  refused 


178     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

it,  and  announced  that  he  had  made  up 
his  mind  he  would  have  nothing  to  do 
with  the  new  regime. 

Tang  Hwa-lung,  jSIinister  for  Edu- 
cation, the  brilHant  political  leader  who 
had  been  Speaker  of  the  Huj)eh  Assem- 
bly, Speaker  of  the  National  House  of 
Representatives,  and  leader  of  one  of  its 
three  dominant  political  parties,  re- 
signed in  September.  Chang  Chien, 
Minister  for  Agriculture  and  Com- 
merce, famous  throughout  China  as  an 
industrial  pioneer  and  social  reformer 
(also  a  constitutional  monarchist),  re- 
signed on  October  30.  Tuan  Chi-jui, 
Minister  for  War,  lifetime  associate  of 
Yuan  Shih-k'ai  and  the  foremost  mili- 
tary authority  in  China,  resigned  on 
August  30,  remained  in  privacy  in 
Peking  for  several  months,  and,  ar- 
cording  to  one  story,  "escaped"  from  , 
the  capital  in  coolie  dress  on  the  first 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     179 

of  January.  Sun  Pao-chi,  ex-Foreign 
Minister,  resigned  from  his  post  as  Di- 
rector of  the  Audit  Department  on 
November  1,  ex-Premier  Hsiung  Hsi- 
^ing,  head  of  the  "government  of  all 
the  talents"  vrhich  pulled  China  so 
splendidly  through  her  crisis  in  1913 
and  1914,  resigned  from  his  post  as  Di- 
rector of  the  Oil  Bureau  (superv^ising 
the  Standard  Oil  Contract)  preceded 
him  by  a  week  or  so,  and  Chuan  En- 
kwan,  Director  of  the  Censorate,  aban- 
doned his  office  on  October  9.  A  flood 
of  minor  resignations  accompanied  and 
followed  these,  and  with  the  decisive  ac- 
tions of  December  15,  when  Yuan  ac- 
cepted the  monarchy,  more  than  thirty 
first-class  resignations  were  handed  in 
within  a  week,  including  the  Vice-Min- 
ister  of  War,  the  Vice-^Iinister  of  the 
Interior,  and  numerous  members  of  the 
Grand  Council  itself.     Not  the  least  of 


180     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

these  was  Tsai  Ao,  ex-Governor  of 
Yunnan,  and  Director  of  the  Land 
Measui'ement  Bureau,  who  left  Tient- 
sin in  December  for  parts  unknown. 
His  whereabouts  became  quickly  evi- 
dent, however,  with  the  appearance  of 
widespread  revolt  in  his  native  province 
of  Yunnan  early  in  January,  a  rebel- 
lion which  led  directly  to  the  indefinite 
postponement  of  the  official  inaugura- 
tion of  the  monarchy,  and  may  lead  to 
results  even  more  decisive  before  it  is 
finished. 

This  list  is  sufficiently  long  akeady  to 
convince  any  fair-minded  person  that 
there  is  no  real  national  voice  in  China 
for  the  change  of  government.  These 
men  are  not  radicals,  neither  are  they 
blind  reactionaries;  they  are  for  the 
most  part  the  "workers"  of  modern 
China  unwedded  to  any  political  theory 
save  that  of  the  maximum  of  national 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     181 

interest.  To  the  fact  that  they  are  ob- 
viously standing  off  from  the  monarchy 
movement  you  must  also  add  the  re- 
minder that  others  of  the  best  minds  of 
China  who  have  not  recently  been  hold- 
ing office  are  equally  as  aloof,  and  ob- 
viously equally  as  determined  to  re- 
main so.  Wu  Ting-fang,  Wen  Tsung- 
yao,  Wang  Chung-hwei,  and  Tang 
Shao-yi,  all  ex-Republican  ministers, 
are  biding  their  time  in  Shanghai;  go- 
ing a  little  further  radical-wards.  Dr. 
Chen  Chin-tao,  Tsai  Yuan-pei,  and 
Wang  Cheng- ting  (C.  T.  Wang),  ex- 
ministers  of  Finance,  Education,  and 
Communications,  are  wholly  out  of 
touch  with  the  monarchical  movement. 
Kang  Yu-wei,  the  great  '98  reformer, 
and  leader  of  Chinese  constitutionalism 
for  fifteen  years,  will  not  even  come  to 
Peking,  so  complete  is  his  distrust  of 
the  current  regime. 


182     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

If  such  men  as  these  are  against,  or 
indifferent  to,  the  monarchy  restoration 
movement,  it  is  a  travesty  to  say  that  it 
represents  anything  like  the  progres- 
sive mind  of  the  Chinese  people.  Who, 
then,  is  for  it?  Well,  let  us  begin  with 
one  significant  instance.  When  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai  toward  the  end  of  January 
announced  that  owing  to  "local  disturb- 
ances" his  inauguration  would  be  post- 
poned, who  was  it  who  bade  him  ascend 
the  throne  promptly,  and  admonished 
him  that  the  rising  was  simply  due  to 
his  delay  in  assuming  the  Imperial  pur- 
ple. Why,  it  was  Prince  Ching,  Man- 
chu  of  the  Manchus,  arch-reactionary, 
life-long  enemy  of  constitutionalism 
and  reform,  the  Premier  of  the  Manchu 
government  overthrow  by  the  Revolu- 
tion in  1911.  Who  was  president  of 
the  Li-fah  Yuan,  the  administrative 
council     which     prepared     and     put 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     183 

through  the  elaborate  fiasco  of  popular 
vote  by  which  Yuan  was  declared  the 
choice  of  "the  people"?  That  was 
Prince  Chun,  another  Manchu  prince, 
ex-Regent,  and  father  of  the  deposed 
little  Chinese  Emperor,  Pu  Yi,  who  to 
this  day  is  allowed  to  live  in  a  palace  in 
Peking  in  all  the  state  of  a  visiting  sov- 
erign — at  the  expense  of  the  Chinese 
people. 

From  this  approval  the  monarchy 
restoration  movement  cannot  separate 
itself.  Nor,  moreover,  can  it  be  denied 
that  its  principal  Chinese  protagonist 
throughout  has  been  Liang  Shih-yi,  the 
most  unscrupulous  political  leader  in 
modern  China  as  well  as  one  of  the  half- 
dozen  of  the  very  ablest  of  them  all. 
By  title,  Liang  is  Director  of  the  Bank 
,of  Communications,  but  in  reality  he 
is  Chief  Director  of  Grand  Strategy  to 
the  President,  and  has  been  so  since 


184    PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA 

Yuan  has  been  in  power  in  Peking. 
This  cunning  Cantonese  is  as  strong  as 
Yuan,  if  not  stronger,  and  in  the  mon- 
archy agitation  he  has  been  playing  a 
characteristic  game.  Chou  Tzu-chi, 
the  clever  ]Minister  of  Finance,  is  also 
the  President's  man,  and  Lu  Cheng- 
hsiang,  the  brilliant  Secretary  of  For- 
eign Affairs,  who  has  just  doubled  up 
with  Hsu  Shih-chang's  old  position  as 
Secretary  of  State,  seems  too  patrioti- 
cally interested  in  the  duties  of  his  own 
crucial  office  to  take  a  vital  interest 
either  way;  but  he  has  not  resigned. 
The  other  members  of  the  Cabinet  seem 
merely  quiescent. 

Behind  Yuan's  name,  the  driving 
force  of  the  monarchist  agitation  has 
come  from  a  group  of  Manchu  Jaco- 
bites led  by  Prince  Ching  and  Prince 
Chun,  and  from  the  cult  of  seekers  after 
place  and  power  always  to  be  found  in 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     185 

the  wake  of  Liang  Shih-yi.  There  is 
another  high  placed  monarchist,  whose 
activities  are  shrouded  in  rather  more 
mystery  than  the  rest — the  President's 
eldest  son  and  prospective  heir-appar- 
ent under  an  Empire,  Yuan  Ko-ting. 
This  young  man  is  popularty  supposed 
to  have  sustained  a  severe  accident  from 
a  fall  from  his  horse  in  the  spring  of 
1911,  a  mishap  which  left  his  vitality 
and  his  desire  to  mingle  in  public  affairs 
at  low  ebb.  His  interference  in  the 
present  conspiracy  is,  however,  unques- 
tionable, and  as  it  has  become  more 
manifest,  so  have  the  stories  increased 
of  his  absorption  in  Buddhism,  his  dis- 
taste of  politics,  and  his  utter  abhor- 
rence of  the  responsibilities  of  royalty. 
But  there  is  little  doubt  that  he  is  one 
of  the  members  of  the  court  camarilla 
whose  intrigues  Liang  Chi-ch'iao  has  so 
bluntly  and  clearly  pointed  out  as  the 


186    PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

secret  manufacturers  of  the  whole  mon- 
archist agitation. 

One  other  factor  remains — the  army. 
No  one  really  knows  where  the  army 
stands.  Tuan  Chi-jui  is  a  general  of 
far-ramifying  influence,  and  there  are 
persistent  rumors  that  Feng  Kuo- 
chang,  the  new  Chief -of -Staff,  has  had 
his  loyalty  considerably  cooled  by 
Tuan's  rupture  with  Peking.  Surely 
leaders  of  the  class  of  Chang  Hsun  (the 
butcher  of  Nanking)  and  Lung  Chi- 
kwong,  the  "pacifier"  of  Canton,  can- 
not be  relied  on  for  loyalty  except 
where  loyalty  is  clearly  shown  to  be 
profitable.  So  far,  these  three  gen- 
erals, together  with  another  veteran, 
Chang  Kwei-ti,  have  been  offered  titles 
as  Dukes  in  the  new  regime,  but  up  to 
February,  they  were  still  refusing  these 
flattering  distinctions.  The  point 
should  not  be  missed  that  these  men 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     187 

hold  a  very  substantial  part  of  the  bal- 
ance of  power  in  modern  China,  and 
since  Yuan  has  bereft  the  country  of 
constitutionalism  far  more  so  than  be- 
fore. 

Yuan  has  aimed  high;  but  as  usual, 
his  first  aim  may  not  be  his  final  shot. 
It  is  impossible  to  believe  that  he  will 
carry  through  his  monarchical  aspira- 
tions unimpaired  against  the  dead  set  of 
opinion  that  has  so  manifestly  arisen 
against  them  in  quarters  to  which 
prudence  at  least  demands  close  and 
respectful  attention.  No  one  has  re- 
minded him  of  the  enduring  limitations 
of  his  situation  more  significantly  than 
the  always  out-spoken  Anglo-Chinese 
writer,  Putnam  Weale,  who,  I  believe, 
is  the  best  foreign  friend  in  the  field  of 
journalism  China  has  at  this  juncture. 

"President  Yuan  Shih-k'ai,"  he  says, 
"will  soon  reach  the  parting  of  the  ways. 


188     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

If  he  allows  such  evil  counselors  to  work 
their  will,  if  he  misinterprets  foreign  si- 
lence, there  is  no  logical  reason  why,  in- 
stead of  becoming  a  Chinese  Washing- 
ton, he  should  become,  for  a  time  at 
least,  an  Asiatic  Napoleon — until  all  is 
ready  in  Japan.  The  reestablishment 
of  the  empire  and  what  it  would  imply 
would  simply  find  the  European  powers 
and  America — the  liberal  nations — in- 
different to  the  fate  of  China.  The  tre- 
mendous moral  sup]3ort  which  saved 
the  situation  in  the  spring  of  1915  will 
never  again  be  given  to  a  nation  which 
declares  itself  afraid  to  govern,  and  thus 
tacitly  admits  that  it  is  a  subject-race. 
All  talk  of  a  constitutional  monarchy  is 
a  mere  juggling  with  words;  a  country 
that  is  convinced  by  'arguments  by 
Professor  Goodnow  and  the  pamphlet- 
eer Yung  Tu,  before  representative 
govermnent  has  even  been  tried,  would 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     189 

be  much  more  easily  convinced  with  a 
shot-gun." 

What  selfish  hopes  and  expectations 
this  veteran  strategist  may  cherish  in 
the  immediate  future  of  his  country  do 
not  concern  us  here.  It  is  for  us  merely 
to  glimpse  the  quality  of  his  mind,  and 
to  conceive  from  the  palpable  facts,  the 
plain  and  perceivable  course  he  has 
traced  through  the  modern  history  of 
China,  the  training  and  traditions  that 
lie  at  the  root  of  his  career  and  that 
have  been  made  manifest  whenever  he 
has  moved  a  piece  on  the  chessboard  of 
politics;  and  especially  from  the  men 
who  are  with  him,  the  men  who  are 
against  him — to  conceive  from  these 
things  what  China  may  expect  in  the 
immediate  future  from  the  free  play  of 
his  genius. 

One  thing  is  plain — that  she  cannot 
expect  real  republicanism  unless  she  is 


190     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

again  ready  to  die  for  the  Republic  that 
is  now  in  such  crucial  danger.* 

*  On  March  22d  the  State  Department  issued  a 
mandate  announcing  on  the  authority  of  Yuan  Shih- 
k'ai  the  abandonment  of  the  monarchy  and  the  re- 
sumption of  the  republic,  thus  providing  the  final 
justification  of  the  soundness  of  the  above  estimate 
of  the  situation.  Hsu  Chi-chang  returned  to  power 
and  signed  the  document  as  Secretary  of  State,  In 
it  Yuan  frankly  admitted  that  the  monarchy  was 
hopeless  and  humbly  shouldered  the  blame  for  his 
mistake  in  these  remarkable  words:  "I  have  myself 
to  blame  for  my  lack  of  virtue.  Why  should  I  blame 
others?  The  people  have  been  thrown  into  misery. 
The  soldiers  have  been  made  to  bear  hardships. 
Commerce  has  declined.  Taking  this  condition  into 
consideration,  I  feel  exceedingly  sorry." 

That  is  Yuan's  way  of  saying — "By  that  sin  fell 
the  angels." 

Moreover,  Yuan's  default,  so  far  from  pacifying 
the  southern  revolutionists,  has  already  stirred  them 
to  add  to  the  "No  Monarchy"  cry  the  old  slogan  of 
the  Second  Revolution,  "Down  with  Yuan  himself!" 
The  result  is  that  he  is  worse  beset  than  before,  and 
a  secession  movement  is  spreading  rapidly  over  the 
south  which  may  mean  more  liberalism,  or  it  may 
mean — Japan. 


VI 

CLUTCHING   HANDS 

SOME  fifteen  years  ago  Lord 
Charles  Beresford  paid  a  short, 
but  breezy  visit  to  the  far  East,  and 
when  he  went  home  he  wrote  a  book 
about  his  trip  that  he  called  "The 
Break-up  of  China."  It  was  a  book 
that  expressed  and  confirmed  the  set- 
tled mood  of  the  time.  In  the  shadow 
of  the  Boxer  terror,  and  the  hardly  less 
shameful  reprisals  that  avenged  it,  the 
dissolution  of  China  did  seem  very  near. 
Subtler  minds  than  that  of  the  impres- 
sionable British  admiral  thought  of  that 
flabby  old  empire,  and  the  image  at  the 
back  of  their  minds  was  one  of  helpless- 
ness baited  all  about  by  clutching  for- 

191 


192     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

eign  hands.  In  the  intimacy  of  the 
crushing  experiences  of  1900  they  for- 
got, as  we  are  forgetting  to-day,  that 
the  weakness  of  China  is  a  verj^  old  and 
a  thoroughly  matured  problem.  They 
might  have  read  to  advantage,  as  we 
might  read  it  now,  what  was  said  in 
the  sixties  by  Anson  Burlingame,  that 
strange,  quixotic  American  genius  who 
went  on  a  mission  to  Europe  half  a  cen- 
tur^^  ago  to  save  China  from  a  dissolu- 
tion which  he  feared  to  see  in  his  own 
lifetime.  How  wholly  modern  it  seems 
to  hear  him  say,  "I  hope  to  procure 
some  mitigation  of  those  aggressive 
steps  and  tendencies  which  are  rapidly 
bringing  nearer  the  parceling-out  of 
China  among  the  greedy  monarchies  of 
Europe" ! 

Since  Burlingame 's  day  waves  upon 
waves  of  the  aggression  in  which  he 
foresaw    immediate    ruin    have    rolled 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     193 

ever  nearer  to  Peking.  China  has  been 
stripped  of  the  fortress-harbors  on  her 
coast;  provinces  and  dependencies  have 
been  torn  from  her  borders  from  Korea 
and  Mongoha  round  to  Tibet  and 
Tongking.  Foreign  trunk  raih'oads 
have  cut  strategic  thoroughfares  up  and 
down  and  across  the  heart  of  her  do- 
minion. Foreign  bankers  and  debt 
commissioners  have  held  in  ransom  her 
finances  and  have  dominated  her  trade. 
And  finally  a  torrent  of  revolution 
from  within  has  rej)laced  the  djTiasty 
of  a  quarter  of  a  thousand  years  with  a 
makeshift  combination  of  republican- 
ism without  democracy  and  tyranny 
without  a  throne.  The  last  fifteen 
years  in  China  have  been  in  particular 
one  steady  course  of  continuous  and 
ascending  crises,  a  drama  of  unsettled 
forces  driven  from  without  by  compli- 
cated  currents   of   political   adventure 


194     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

and  economic  greed.  Yet  in  the  face 
of  all  these  humihations,  which  have 
comprised  the  dehberate  policy  of  our 
generation  to  capitalize  and  perpetuate 
her  feebleness,  look  with  unprejudiced 
eyes  on  the  China  of  this  year  1916,  and 
what  do  you  find?  China's  reply  to 
the  humiliations  that  have  been  put 
upon  her  is  not  merely  the  new  patriot- 
ism and  the  new  sense  of  nationality  so 
vividly  revealed  in  the  Revolution,  but 
actually  a  firmer  and  better  consoli- 
dated authority  over  the  eighteen  prov- 
inces of  the  nation  than  has  ever  before 
been  attained  in  the  history  of  the 
Chinese  people. 

In  the  year  of  which  we  have  the  last 
complete  record,  the  year  1914,  China 
accomplished  two  amazing  and  abso- 
lutely unprecedented  things,  which  no 
one  who  does  not  know  of  the  Sisyphus- 
Hke  handicaps  against  her  can  possibly 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     195 

appreciate.  On  her  own  national  credit 
and  among  her  own  people  she  raised, 
in  the  first  place,  her  first  substantial 
domestic  loans,  a  financial  initiative 
which  has  now  brought  her  a  fund  of  al- 
most thirty  millions  of  dollars.  And  in 
the  second  she  came  at  last  through  a 
whole  financial  year  not  only  with  the 
staggering  burdens  of  her  foreign  in- 
debtedness paid  up  on  the  nail  to  the 
last  penny,  but  with  an  actual  surplus 
of  cash  in  hand  that  was  helped  by  no 
foreign  loan.  These  are  real  bids  for 
freedom,  not  mere  clever  financial  man- 
agement ;  they  are  the  moral  answer  of 
a  people  protesting  against  the  extinc- 
tion of  their  political  life. 

These  very  significant  innovations 
mean  one  thing  very  plainly:  that  the 
old  peril — the  peril  of  bankruptcy,  of 
attrition  through  incompetence  that 
Beresford  and  his  school  talked  about 


196     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

— is,  to  say  the  least,  no  longer  a  sure 
thing.  The  game  of  getting  deeper 
and  deeper  into  the  mire  by  paying  off 
old  debts  with  new  loans  is  almost  over 
in  China. 

I  emphasize  these  unquestionable 
signs  of  progress  and  growing  solidar- 
ity to  put  them  in  all  the  sharper  con- 
trast with  a  new  peril — a  peril  that 
within  the  past  year  has  overshadowed 
everything  else  in  the  far  East.  That 
is  the  series  of  harsh  and  drastic  de- 
mands which  Japan  in  1915  put  up  to 
China,  in  the  nature,  if  not  in  the 
form,  of  a  peremptory  ultimatum. 
Nothing  is  more  ironic  than  the  distinc- 
tion, the  perfect  contrast  between  the 
old  peril  through  which  China  was  at 
last  beginning  to  see  her  path  to  self- 
respect,  and  this  new  peril,  against 
which  all  her  painful  reconstruction 
counts     as    absolutely    nothing.     The 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     197 

handicaps  that  have  been  loaded  on  her 
do  count.  Their  example  counts  in 
spurring  Japan  on  to  an  emulation 
which  European  nations  can  hardly 
deny  her  with  consistency.  Their  po- 
litical results  count  in  making  Japan 
feel  that  only  by  other  like  handicaps 
— which  in  her  case  begin  to  look  like 
badges  of  ownership — can  she  make 
good  her  opportimities  in  terms  of  a 
new  balance  of  power  in  the  Pacific. 
In  other  words,  the  burdens  of  interna- 
tional meddling  provide  an  essential 
and  ideal  condition  for  the  present  high 
tide  of  Japanese  aggression.  They 
have  chloroformed  the  victim ;  but  it  has 
fallen  to  a  rival  to  pick  his  pockets. 

Japan's  hegemony  in  the  far  East  is 
now  assured — temporarily,  at  any  rate 
— and  in  it  we  see  the  first  and  the  most 
dramatic  alteration  in  the  world's  bal- 
ance of  power  which  has  so  far  been  ef- 


198     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

fected  by  the  great  war.  So  far  as  her 
new  ascendancy  is  going  to  influence 
China,  however,  we  cannot  see  her  op- 
portunity in  its  right  proportions  until 
we  have  put  it  from  the  side  of  China 
herself.  The  Japanese  have  raised  the 
wind  undoubtedly  in  which  China's 
junk  is  madly  careering  to-day,  but  it 
was  not  they  who  over-ballasted  her 
with  debts  and  difficulties,  so  that  even 
in  time  of  peace  her  loadline  was  over 
her  hatches.  It  is  true  that  the  crush- 
ing indemnity  she  imposed  at  the  end 
of  the  Chino- Japanese  War  of  1895 
put  China  in  debt  to  the  tune  of  over 
$270,000,000  *  at  the  beginning  of  her 
borrowing  career.  But  this  sum  was 
assented  to  by  the  powers  at  a  time 
when  they  exercised  real  interference  in 
the  affairs  of  Japan.  And  five  years 
later  they  made  it  look  insignificant  in- 

*0f  which  about  $150,000,000  is  still  outstanding. 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     199 

deed  when  they  placed  on  China's 
shoulders  the  long-drawn-out  disaster 
of  the  Boxer  indemnity.  It  was  Eu- 
rope that  set  the  pace,  and  it  is  Euro- 
pean policy  that  has  made  China  what 
she  is  to-day.  That  is  why  an  under- 
standing of  that  policy  is  absolutely 
vital  in  order  to  grasp  in  its  proper  per- 
spective the  peril  of  the  present. 

To-day  the  Boxer  indemnity  is  still 
the  freshest  and  the  most  stinging  of  all 
the  grievances  of  the  Chinese  people. 
They  see  clearly  that  this  monstrous  im- 
position, hypocritically  imposed  on 
them  as  a  moral  penalty,  was  in  reality 
nothing  more  or  less  than  a  deliberate 
quietus  on  their  political  asi3irations  for 
a  generation.  For  the  powers  not  only 
created  a  gigantic  obligation;  they 
stultified  the  very  consolidation  which 
might  have  enabled  China  to  meet  that 
obligation.     For  their  own  benefit  they 


200     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

appropriated  and  pared  down  all  the 
funds  that  could  really  be  called  na- 
tional, and  the  reorganization  which  it 
was  then  their  supreme  opportunity  to 
initiate  they  contemptuously  disclaimed. 
Those  consequences  we  see  to-day. 
They  culminated  in  a  revolution,  which 
had  its  fundamental  cause  more  nearly 
than  anything  else  in  this  one  fact — 
China's  humiliation  before  her  foreign 
bondholders.  When  the  revolution 
broke  out  in  October,  1911,  three  prov- 
inces were  in  revolt  against  the  national- 
ization of  railways,  not  because  they 
were  opposed  to  that  policy,  but  be- 
cause its  influence  was  a  foreign  influ- 
ence and  because  it  meant  the  buying 
out  of  Chinese  railways  with  foreign 
money.  And  indeed  then  the  second 
chapter  of  interference  by  the  interna- 
tional concert  was  just  beginning.  In 
the  first  chapter  the  great  banking  pow- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     201 

ers  really  sought  nothing  more  than  to 
paralyze  Chinese  reconstruction  before 
the  rush  of  foreign  initiative  they  knew 
was  imminent.  The  second  chapter  saw 
them  meeting  another  great  crisis  in 
Chinese  societj^  with  the  belated  decision 
to  put  this  reconstruction  into  effect 
themselves.  We  can  lump  together  the 
series  of  sweeping  concessions  and  re- 
arrangements and  internal  crises  which 
culminated  in  the  big  five-power  loan 
of  the  spring  of  1913  in  an  intelligent 
appreciation  of  one  main  object.  This 
was  the  creation  of  a  debt  commission. 
The  shadows  of  revolutionary  turmoil 
and  anarchy  gave  a  unique  opportunity 
for  the  painless  absorption  of  China's 
freedom.  Viewed  as  a  single  process, 
it  is  amazing  to  look  back  and  see  how 
far  this  strategy  went  as  a  firm  and  de- 
liberate policy. 

There   were   two  lines   of   advance: 


202     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

every  power  got  what  it  could  for  itself 
by  developing  the  "spheres  of  interest" 
wedge  into  the  fast-decaying  "open- 
door"  theory;  and  the  consortium  as  a 
whole  conceived  and  put  into  operation 
a  practical  framework  of  foreign  con- 
trol at  Peking.  It  was  then  that  Russia 
got  outer  INIongolia  and  that  England 
invented  and  enforced  new  prerogatives 
in  Tibet.  Railway  absorption  prom- 
ised Germany  twenty  million  dollars' 
worth  of  new  lines  in  southern  and 
western  Shantung.  Japan  got  eleven 
hundred  miles  of  new  railway  conces- 
sions in  INIanchuria  and  eastern  ]Mon- 
golia,  an  invaluable  foothold  for  vali- 
dating her  present  claims.  France  and 
Russia  between  them,  with  a  Belgian 
company  as  a  cat's-paw,  cut  China  with 
grandiose  completeness  by  two  vast  sys- 
tems from  the  French  border  on  the 
south  to  a  rail-head  in  the  extreme  north 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     203 

in  easy  competing  distance  with  the 
trans-Siberian,  and  by  a  concession  of 
three  thousand  miles  through  the  heart 
of  China  to  the  sea,  pointing  in  the  far 
west  directly  toward  the  spreading 
trans-Caspian  system  from  European 
Russia.  England  confirmed  her  hold 
with  two  thousand  miles  of  new  proj- 
ects in  the  Yang-tse  basin.  Our  own 
bankers  were  ordered  off  these  much- 
trespassed  premises  by  President  Wil- 
son himself,  but  it  is  a  question  if  we 
did  not  carry  away  the  choicest  single 
plum  of  all  when  the  Standard  Oil 
Company  secured  what  amounts  to  the 
exclusive  exploiting  right  over  the 
northwestern  oil-fields,  agreed  by  more 
than  one  international  authority  to  be 
the  richest  oil-deposits  in  the  known 
world. 

The  course  of  these  concessions  was 
one  of  the  most  chaotic  competition  and 


204     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

opportunism,  but  the  broad  lines  into 
which  they  have  resolved  themselves  to- 
day bear  all  the  earmarks  of  conceded 
privileges,  which  the  financial  con- 
sortium divided  up  at  its  council  tables 
in  Peking.  Their  group  achievements 
w^ere  even  more  impressive.  The  four- 
power  railroads  concentrating  on  Han- 
kow comprise  a  typical  instance  of  joint 
control,  a  rather  amusing  instance  now, 
in  that  the  German  section  can  be  ap- 
propriated bj'-  its  French  and  British 
co-promoters,  while  the  Americans  look 
on  in  China,  as  in  the  western  world, 
as  helpless  neutrals. 

This  condition  reached  its  high-water 
mark  in  those  days  of  anarchy  and  dis- 
integration immediately  following  the 
forced  passage  of  the  five-power  loan  at 
the  end  of  April,  1913,  when  a  large 
part  of  the  South,  led  by  most  of  the 
men  who  had  been  prominent  in  the 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     205 

first  revolution,  definitely  broke  their 
allegiance  with  President  Yuan  Shih- 
k'ai's  government.  I  was  in  Peking 
just  after  this  loan  was  passed,  and  I 
tell  elsewhere  how  the  Southern  leaders 
began  there  and  then  their  desperate 
and  futile  fight.  I  traveled  south,  find- 
ing rumors  of  an  impending  rebellion 
more  and  more  insistent  and  circum- 
stantial; and  the  very  night  that  rebel- 
lion broke  out  in  the  middle  Yang-tse 
provinces  I  was  with  Dr.  Sun  Yat-sen 
at  the  offices  of  his  railway  administra- 
tion at  Shanghai.  I  can  say  confidently 
that  the  second  revolution  had  as  one 
of  its  most  wide-spread  and  influential 
causes  the  apprehension  of  this  very 
debt  commission.  The  strain  of  sans- 
culottism  in  the  first  revolution,  which 
had  much  cleverer  and  more  responsible 
leaders  than  it  has  ever  been  given  credit 
for,  revolted  at  the  idea  not  so  much  that 


206     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Yuan  Shih-k'ai  was  seizing  the  country 
for  his  own  purposes,  but  that  he  was 
seizing  it  for  the  foreigner's  purposes. 
Envy  and  constitutional  futihty  sub- 
merged this  idea  later  beneath  empty 
personal  vituperations  against  the  presi- 
dent; but  although  the  vituperations 
were  excessive  and  unjust,  the  president 
has  never  altogether  lived  down  the 
original  apprehension.  Surely  the 
enormous  burst  of  foreign  railway  and 
commercial  concessions  following  the 
crushing  of  the  Southern  party — nearly 
five  thousand  miles  of  new  railway  lines 
being  conceded,  for  instance,  in  a  little 
over  a  year  to  enterprises  beyond  direct 
Chinese  control — has  not  tended  to  re- 
store confidence  among  the  exiled  revo- 
lutionaries that  their  apprehensions 
were  unfounded. 

The  opportunity  for  a  debt  commis- 
sion reached  its  high-water  mark,  how- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     207 

ever,  in  this  stormy  and  rancorous  pe- 
riod; since  then,  by  an  unforeseen  com- 
bination of  circumstances,  it  has  steadily 
and  surely  receded.  The  most  unfore- 
seen of  all  these  circumstances  is  the  one 
I  mentioned  at  the  beginning  of  the 
chapter:  it  is  that  China  has  begun  to 
pull  herself  together.  The  old  leisurely 
method  of  weakening  China  by  taking 
things  from  her  bit  by  bit,  justifying 
each  step  by  international  cooperation 
and  agreement,  was  already  disappear- 
ing from  the  scroll  of  things  that  are 
before  the  European  War.  That  terri- 
ble event  left  only  the  framework  of  a 
Consortium ;  its  vitality  has  been  weak- 
ened for  years  to  come,  just  as  the  brain 
is  weakened  when  the  blood  flows  to  aid 
the  digestion  after  a  dull  dinner ;  urgent 
elementals  demand  overwhelming  con- 
sideration elsewhere. 

Even  had  there  been  no  war,  however, 


208     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

the  effect  of  the  new  spirit  of  Chinese 
sohdarity  would  still  have  shifted  things 
through  its  own  momentum  alone. 
That  is  the  great  lesson  in  the  present 
stage  of  China's  crisis.  The  recon- 
struction in  a  political  sense  has  been  in 
some  respects  extremely  disappointing; 
especially  so  is  the  concentration  of 
great  power  in  the  hands  of  the  Presi- 
dent, whose  personal  influence  has  been 
so  profound  that  his  removal  would  now 
be  a  very  grave  destruction  of  balance 
indeed.  But  the  financial  reconstruc- 
tion which  has  been  guided — and  here 
is  a  case  where  a  genuine  tribute  must 
be  paid  to  Yuan  Shih-k'ai — by  a  group 
of  the  ablest  and  most  progressive 
minds  in  modern  China,  has  been  im- 
pressive. A  whole  category  of  new 
taxes  has  been  ably  and  most  success- 
fully imposed,  a  success  in  which  the 
patriotism  of  the  people  has  played  a 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     209 

part  unique  in  humdrum  financial  his- 
tory. China  has  imposed  and  collected 
such  modern  imposts  as  a  marriage  tax, 
an  income  tax,  an  inheritance  tax,  and 
a  tax  on  title-deeds ;  she  has  drawn  ex- 
cise from  luxuries,  such  as  wine  and  to- 
bacco; and  she  has  put  two  national 
banks,  the  Bank  of  China  and  the  Bank 
of  Communications,  on  a  broad  and  re- 
sponsible foundation  that  those  who 
have  dreaded  the  nightmare  of  her 
bankruptcy  would  never  have  beheved 
conceivable.  The  result  has  been  not 
only  a  year  of  solvency,  but  the  general 
confidence  that  the  grip  thus  attained 
will  be  held  with  an  increasing  margin 
in  the  heavy  years  of  amortization  that 
are  to  come.  The  Government  has 
spread  this  confidence  by  a  series  of 
wise  and  liberal  redemptions  of  its  obli- 
gations of  the  immediate  and  stormy 
past.     Five  million  dollars'  worth  of 


210     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

the  worthless  paper  notes  of  the  Rev- 
olution were  bought  back  in  1914 
in  the  big  commercial  province  of 
Kwangtung;  in  Szechuen,  at  the  other 
end  of  southern  China,  $2,250,000 
worth  of  the  miHtary  bonds  of  the  Nan- 
king government  were  redeemed  and 
publicly  burned  at  a  patriotic  celebra- 
tion. And  on  February  20,  1915,  in 
Peking,  amid  a  band  concert  and  many 
speeches,  and  not  without  fii'eworks  in 
the  evening,  a  drawing  took  place  of 
over  half  a  million  dollars'  worth  of 
these  notes  in  a  single  day,  the  holders 
of  which  were  given  the  characteristic 
square  deal  of  China  in  a  manner  that 
offered  the  convincing  evidence  of  hard 
cash  to  the  most  impenetrable  of  skep- 
tics.* 

*  It  is  now  known  that  for  the  year  1915  China 
again  made  both  ends  meet  with  a  substantial  balance 
to  her  credit.  The  customs  receipts  for  the  month 
of  January,  the  best  index  to  China's  trade  conditions, 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     211 

The  political  meaning  of  this  new 
consolidation  of  the  best  forces  in  China 
is  clear:  it  is  that  if  China  had  only  to 
face  the  old  menace  of  international  at- 
trition, she  really  has  now  a  basis  to 
start  on  a  program  which  could  be  called 
without  absurd  optimism  a  campaign 
of  rights-recovery.  Already  her  finan- 
cial masters  are  yielding  to  the  pressure, 
as  well  as  to  their  own  common  sense. 
It  needed  only  a  firm  Anglo-American 

show  an  increase  over  last  year.  The  reorganized 
Salt  Taxes,  which  yielded  $6,000,000  in  1913,  and 
rose  to  $;39,000,000  in  1914,  went  up  in  1915  well  over 
$30,000,000.  The  flourishing  state  of  China's  govern- 
ment railways  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  the  Peking- 
Mukden,  Peking-Kalgan,  and  Peking-Hankow  lines, 
besides  accounting  for  steady  progress  in  new  con- 
struction beyond  Kalgan,  produced  between  them 
a  net  revenue  to  the  state  of  over  $6,000,000.  Agricul- 
tural experimentation  is  being  carried  on  on  a  large 
scale,  particularly  in  the  tea  and  silk  industries,  to 
the  latter  of  which  $10,000,000  was  contributed  by 
the  government  during  the  early  part  of  the  European 
War  for  the  relief  of  the  silk  filatures.  Finally 
Chinese  Government  bonds  are  still  quoted,  as  they 
have  been  for  some  years  past,  at  a  higher  rate  than 
those  of  Japan. 


212     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

protest  to  cut  down  the  revolutionary 
indemnities  from  twenty-odd  millions 
claimed  to  barely  three  millions  recog- 
nized, which  only  at  best  is  something 
like  a  just  estimate  of  the  foreign  prop- 
erty destroyed  in  the  Revolution. 

It  is  in  the  perspective  of  this  recon- 
struction and  this  hopefulness  that  we 
have  to  face  the  deep-lying  peril  of  the 
Japanese  ultimatum  of  last  year. 
What  does  it  mean  to  China?  The 
Japanese  claim  that  the  demands  it 
forced  through,  as  well  as  those  it  al- 
lowed to  be  postponed,  do  not  in  any 
way  jeopardize  the  integrity  or  the  in- 
dependence of  China.  China  takes  a 
different  view.  She  lives  in  mortal  ap- 
prehension. Liang  Chi-ch'iao  puts  her 
case  bluntly  when  he  says:  "The  guilt 
of  Belgium  is  that  she  failed  to  follow 
the  example  of  Luxemburg;  the  guilt 
of  China  is  that  she  has  failed  to  follow 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     213 

the  example  of  Korea.  .  .  ."  It  is  a 
political  impasse  characteristically  East- 
ern when  a  high  Chinese  minister  replies 
in  words  such  as  these  to  an  adversary 
which  has  placed  on  record  this  assur- 
ance from  Count  Okuma :  "As  Premier 
of  Japan,  I  have  stated,  and  I  now 
again  state  to  the  people  of  America 
and  of  the  world,  that  Japan  has  no  ul- 
terior motive,  no  desire  to  secure  more 
territory,  no  thought  of  depriving 
China  or  other  peoples  of  anything  they 
possess." 

It  is  obvious,  in  spite  of  anything 
Count  Okuma  may  say,  that  Japan  has 
made  a  very  decisive  forward  move- 
ment. Nevertheless,  before  we  take  up 
the  conditions  of  that  advance,  let  us 
chasten  ourselves  with  this  honest  ad- 
mission :  that  whatever  may  be  its  cause 
and  whatever  its  objective,  it  has  a 
dozen  perfectly  plausible  justifications 


214     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

in  point  of  its  simple  emulation  of  the 
recognized  Em*opean  procedure  toward 
China  during  the  last  fifteen  years.  Is 
the  Japanese  conference  at  Peking  in 
respect  to  JNIanchm'ia  really  vitally  dif- 
ferent from  the  recent  British-Chinese 
conference  at  DarjiUng  to  secure  the 
isolation  of  Tibet,  or  from  the  Russo- 
Chinese  conference  at  Kiaklita  to  con- 
firm the  Russification  of  Mongolia? 
On  the  surface  it  is  not  vitally  different 
either  from  these  or  from  the  German 
seizure  of  Kiaochow  or  the  no  less  fla- 
grant French  appropriation  of  Annam 
and  Tongking.  More  than  this,  it  ap- 
pears to  be  the  perfectly  legitimate  at- 
tempt of  a  strong  Asiatic  power  to  pro- 
tect a  weak  one  against  the  further  de- 
predations which  experience  shows  must 
still  be  expected  from  the  greedy  pow- 
ers of  Europe.  The  argument  of  the 
necessary  expansion  of  Japan  for  pur- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     215 

poses  of  colonization  and  trade  is  also 
perfectly  plausible  and  legitimate. 
Why  do  we  find,  then,  this  stubborn, 
nay,  desperate  opposition  of  China  to  a 
kindred  ^^ower  which  comes  with  such 
friendh^  words  and  such  finite  pledges 
of  innocuousness  ?  Why  are  the  ordi- 
nary run  of  the  Chinese  people  so  pro- 
foundly moved  that  in  a  single  week  of 
February,  1915,  as  many  as  twenty-five 
hundred  telegrams  were  received  by  the 
Government  in  Peking  from  hundreds 
of  provincial  towns  and  small  villages  in 
every  part  of  the  republic,  urging  China 
to  put  the  last  ounce  of  her  energy  into 
withstanding  the  demands  of  Japan? 
The  reason  is  to  be  found  in  the  de- 
mands themselves.  Let  us  have  clearly 
in  mind  just  what  these  demands  were; 
which  of  them  have  perforce  been 
granted,  and  which  have  been  post- 
poned.    This    was    no    accidental    di- 


216     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

vision — in  her  ultimatum  of  May  7, 
1915,  Japan  threatened  China  with  war 
unless  the  first  four  groups  of  her  de- 
mands were  accepted  as  they  stood. 
The  fifth  and  last  group  was  "post- 
poned." The  first  four  groups  gave 
Japan  the  following  concessions: 

In  South  Manchuria  and  Eastern 
Mongolia  the  Japanese  won  the  privi- 
leges, which  no  other  foreign  nation  en- 
joys, of  leasing  and  owning  land,  of 
free  and  unrestricted  travel  and  resi- 
dence and  commerce;  as  well  as  the 
rights  of  exclusively  working  practi- 
cally all  valuable  mining  sites,  of  con- 
trol of  all  loans  for  general  develop- 
ment (with  the  shadowy  exception 
that  the  Chinese  might  still  raise  money 
among  themselves  for  special  pur- 
poses), and  of  control  of  all  new 
railway  enterprises.  Add  to  these  the 
renewal  of  the  Port  Arthur  lease  for 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     217 

99  years,  and  the  lease  of  the  important 
Kirin-Changchun  Railway  for  the 
same  period  (the  South  Manchuria  sys- 
tem went  with  Port  Arthur),  and  the 
powerful  advantages  reaped  by  Japan 
in  this  field  alone  become  obvious. 

In  Shantung,  for  the  trouble  and 
pains  of  capturing  Tsingtao,  the  Japa- 
nese claimed  and  received  all  the  Ger- 
man prerogatives  in  the  Kiaochow 
sphere  and  in  the  gi'eat  province  of 
Shantung  as  well.  She  secured  a 
pledge  that  no  harbor  or  island  on  this 
coast  would  be  alienated  from  Chinese 
control.  She  won  the  right  to  build  a 
very  important  strategic  railway  from 
Lungkow  (where  by  a  curious  coinci- 
dence the  Japanese  landed)  to  a  junc- 
tion with  the  German  railway.  And 
for  all  this  she  merely  promised  to  give 
Tsingtao  back  to  China  wlien  the  taar 
was  over,  establishing  her  own  position 


218     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

there  meanwhile  by  securing  China's 
promise  of  a  Japanese  concession  "at  a 
place  to  be  designated  by  the  Japanese 
Government." 

In  the  case  of  the  Hanyehping  Coal 
and  Iron  Company,  China's  gi*eatest 
manufacturing  corporation,  China  was 
obliged  to  promise  that  "in  view  of  the 
intimate  relations  between  Japanese 
capitalists  and  this  enterprise,"  no  ac- 
tion tending  to  confiscate  this  company, 
nor  to  convert  it  into  a  state  enterprise, 
nor  to  cause  it  to  borrow  or  to  use  capi- 
tal other  than  Japanese  would  be  per- 
mitted. 

In  the  case  of  Fukien,  the  coast  prov- 
ince opposite  the  Japanese  island  of 
Formosa  (a  war  spoil  of  1895),  China 
pledged  herself  not  to  allow  foreign  na- 
tions to  construct  harbors,  docks,  coal- 
ing stations,  or  anything  approaching 
a   naval   base — or   to    borrow   money 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     219 

abroad  to  accomplish  such  purposes 
herself. 

Finally,  China  engaged  herself  not  to 
alienate  or  lease  from  her  power  any 
islands,  harbors,  or  strips  of  territory 
along  her  coast. 

This  is  what  Japan  actually  got. 
How  much  higher  she  aimed  is  ob- 
vious from  a  brief  consideration  of  the 
fifth  group  she  was  obliged  to  postpone. 
This  included  a  proposal  that  a  large 
proportion  of  her  arms  and  ammunition 
must  be  made  by  Japan,  either  in  Chi- 
nese factories  under  Japanese  control 
or  by  purchase  from  Japan  herself. 
Another  proposal  suggested  that  China 
employ  Japanese  "advisers"  in  high 
positions  at  Peking.  Another  de- 
manded land-owning  privileges  for 
schools  and  hospitals  in  the  interior; 
and  another  brought  forward  the  proj- 
ect so  profitably  exploited  in  Korea,  the 


220     PRESENT-DAY  CHIXA 

propagation  of  Buddhism  by  Japa- 
nese throughout  China.  Joint  control 
of  the  police  in  "certain  sections"  and  a 
sphere  of  interest  in  Fukien  were  added 
to  the  list,  and  last  and  most  amazing 
of  all,  the  right  to  build  a  rail  from 
Kiukiang  on  the  Yang-tse  up  to  Wu- 
chang opposite  Hankow  and  down 
to  Hangchow  and  Swatow  (presum- 
ably) on  the  coast  opposite  Formosa. 
This  latter  project  cut  through  the 
heart  of  the  oldest  British  sphere  of  in- 
terest in  China,  and  did  as  much  as  any- 
thing toward  rousing  the  bitter  resent- 
ment with  which  these  demands  were  re- 
garded from  the  beginning  by  all  Eng- 
lishmen in  the  Orient. 

How  any  statesman,  even  an  Orien- 
tal statesman,  can  soberly  consider  these 
demands,  and  then  tell  us  that  they  take 
nothing  away  from  China  which  was 
hers  before,  must  come  as  a  shock  to 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     221 

friends  both  of  China  and  Japan.  It 
is  refreshing  to  note  that  the  majority 
of  Japanese  agree  with  apologists  hke 
Dr.  lyenaga,  the  responsible  and  re- 
spected chief  of  the  Japanese  press  bu- 
reau in  New  York,  who  says  in  defend- 
ing Japan's  procedure  that  her  recent 
achievements  merit  her  a  "place  in  the 
sun."  That  is  a  proper  defense,  and 
it  places  Japanese  psychology  in  per- 
fectly correct  accord  with  a  certain  psy- 
chology now  prevalent  in  Europe,  on 
which  we  have  fairl}^  well  made  up  our 
minds. 

The  blunt  truth  is  that  these  demands 
strike  at  the  heart  of  China's  sover- 
eignty. Japan  tells  us  this  is  not  so; 
but  the  world  has  not  forgotten  that 
Japan  said  precisely  the  same  thing  in 
the  Korean  business.  We  are  coming 
to  learn  only  slowly  in  America  that  it 
is  not  necessary  to  be  a  jingoist  to  sus- 


222     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

pect  Japanese  foreign  policy  of  utter 
unscrupulousness.  From  the  start,  the 
negotiations  with  China  which  ended 
with  the  Ultimatum  of  May,  1915,  were 
marked  with  a  lack  of  good  faith  which 
led  many  an  American  in  the  Far  East 
to  a  total  change  of  mind  about  Japan. 
She  denied  that  there  were  any  negotia- 
tions at  all  until  China's  repeated  and 
desperate  appeals  for  understanding 
and  assistance  made  further  conceal- 
ment impossible.  Japanese  leaders  as 
high-placed  as  Count  Okuma  resorted 
to  a  campaign  of  smooth  phrases  in  this 
country  and  Europe  (I  quote  the 
phrases  above  from  the  Independent) 
definitely  intended  to  mislead  friends  of 
China.  This  seems  a  strong  indict- 
ment, and  I  wish  I  had  the  space  to 
prove  at  length,  by  the  testimony  of 
the  available  printed  documents,  what 
so  many  of  the  readers  of  this  book  may 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     223 

still  be  inclined  to  doubt.  I  can  only 
submit  the  following  very  typical  com- 
parison, however,  between  what  Count 
Okuma  said,  and  what  Japan  de- 
manded, and  demanded  to  his  knowl- 
edge and  at  his  direction  as  Imperial 
Prime  Minister  and  Chief  Executive: 

Cotint     Okuma,     through       Japanese      Government's 

the     Koksai     {Official)  communique  of  May  7, 

News  Agency,  Apr.  3,  giving     demands     pre- 

1915:  sented  on  Jan.  IS: 

"Japan     has     not     de-  "The    Central    Chinese 

manded   the  appointment      Government  must  engage 

of   Japanese   advisers."  influential     Japanese     as 

political,     military,     and 

financial   advisers." 

Could  witness  of  unscrupulous  policy 
be  plainer  than  that  ? 

Count  Okuma  also  stated  that  Japan 
wanted  joint  police  control  only  in  cer- 
tain specified  areas  in  South  Man- 
churia (bad  enough!)  ;  whereas  the  con- 
trol at  first  demanded  specified  no 
limits.  He  took  the  meanest  of  diplo- 
matic advantages — he  kept  the  truth  se- 
cret,  and  then  mis-stated   it   semi-of- 


224     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

ficially.  And  while  the  whole  Chinese 
nation  was  aflame  with  the  desperate 
danger  of  the  situation,  he  was  telling 
the  world  (in  the  same  despatch,  sent 
abroad  by  Renter)  that  "misinforma- 
tion had  been  scattered  broadcast 
largely  by  German  interests,  and  this 
has  given  agitators  in  China  an  oppor- 
tunity f  He  dismissed  all  this  amaz- 
ing list  of  aggressions  with  a  phrase: 
they  largely  consisted  in  an  endeavor 
to  settle  some  "questions" — by  impli- 
cation, of  little  importance — "of  long 
standing,  some  since  the  Russo-Japa- 
nese War."  "When  the  final  disclos- 
ures are  made,"  he  concluded,  "it  will 
be  found  that  the  whole  situation  has 
been  grossly  exaggerated." 

They  have  been  made,  and  we  can 
see  now,  considering  the  record  of  her 
adversary  in  Korea,  how  bold  and  un- 
scrupulous a  stroke  China  had  reason 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     225 

to  fear — and  has  reason  still.  Indeed, 
the  procedure  of  Japan  in  China, 
from  the  direct  parallel  in  the  demand 
to  propagate  Buddhism  in  a  country  al- 
ready powerfully  Buddhist,  to  the 
shrewd  diplomacy  which  divides  and 
stultifies  the  victim's  friends  with  half- 
truths,  bears  in  a  hundred  ways  a  fatal 
resemblance  to  the  procedure  we  have 
already  seen  carried  through  in  Korea. 
But  that  does  not  say,  however,  that  the 
Chinese  will,  by  illusory  promises  or  by 
bullying  aggression,  be  brought  to  any 
such  humiliating  conclusion.  The  situ- 
ation is  not  yet  nearly  so  desperate. 
With  the  granting  of  her  demands  the 
hegemony  of  the  Far  East  unquestion- 
ably has  passed  into  Japan's  hands. 
Beside  the  Koreans,  the  Chinese  are  a 
nation  of  indestructible  hardihood,  and 
were  experienced  in  the  art  of  govern- 
ing themselves  and  of  absorbing  within 


226     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

their  vast  extent  conqueror  after 
conqueror  long  before  the  Japanese 
emerged  from  a  state  of  tribalism. 
But  it  is  desperate  enough  to  oblige  us 
to  follow  step  by  step,  with  unwinking 
eyes  toward  the  future,  the  clues  to 
Japan's  hoped-for  powers  that  we  can 
trace  in  the  region  where  she  has  power 
already  compassed  and  completed:  in 
Manchuria.  And  with  the  sincerest 
respect  in  the  world  it  must  be  said 
that  we  have  only  learned  from  her 
activities  in  Manchuria  to  fear  the 
monopoly  in  fact,  if  not  in  form,  which 
she  clearly  proposes  to  set  up  ulti- 
mately over  China  as  a  whole. 

A  word  on  the  special  incident  of 
Japanese  control  in  Manchuria  is  thus 
extremely  relevant  to  our  appre- 
hensions. "There  is  absolutely  no 
doubt  that  in  Southern  Manchuria," 
said  our  late  Minister  Rockhill  in  his 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     227 

famous  last  speech  of  November  12, 
1914,  "British  and  American  trade  have 
been  steadily  declining  ever  since  that 
part  of  China  passed  under  Japanese 
control;  nor  is  there  any  doubt  that  it 
has  been  driven  out  in  a  great  part  by 
Japanese  competition,  supported  by 
preferential  customs  and  railway  rates, 
shipping  bounties,  and  successful  resist- 
ance to  paying  China's  internal  taxes." 
Thus  also  the  American  Association  of 
China  in  its  report  for  1914:  "Jajianese 
methods  constitute  a  most  serious  viola- 
tion of  the  open-door  principle.  .  .  . 
Competition  takes  the  form  of  a  system 
of  rebates,  not  only  in  freight  and 
steamer  rates,  but  in  remission  of  duties 
and  charges  which  are  assessed  against 
all  other  nations." 

In  other  words,  special  favors  intan- 
gible in  legal  terms,  but  all  powerful  in 
practical  business  operations,  follow  the 


228     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Japanese  flag  with  as  deliberate  an  in- 
tention of  making  foreign  trade  impos- 
sible as  was  the  persistent  intention  of 
General  Nogi  to  make  live  Russians  im- 
possible in  certain  sections  of  Man- 
churia. 

This  was  the  condition  before  the  Ul- 
timatum of  last  year.  What  it  is  to  be 
in  the  future  we  can  only  realize  by 
grasping  the  current  understanding  of 
all  students  of  the  diplomacy  of  the 
Far  East :  namely ;  that,  under  the  new 
provisions.  South  Manchuria  and  East- 
ern Mongolia  have  acquired  a  Japanese 
character  and  prerogative  that  no  for- 
eign power  will  be  disposed  to  ques- 
tion without  counting  the  cost. 

The  same  procedure,  on  a  smaller 
scale,  is  already  being  rapidly  re- 
enacted  at  Tsingtao,  and  wherever 
else  the  Japanese  spread  their  influence 
through    Shantung.     Everywhere    the 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     229 

prerogatives  of  the  Germans  are  being 
increased  and  accentuated.  Where  the 
Germans  used  Chinese  currency  and 
the  Chinese  language,  their  rivals  have 
rigidly  insisted  on  Japanese.  The  Ger- 
man-Chinese railroad,  with  fewer  than 
a  hundred  German  employees  and  the 
rest  Chinese,  has  been  entirely  manned 
by  Japanese  from  the  South  Manchur- 
ian  system.  The  Japanese  first  insisted 
on  a  customs'  collector  at  Tsingtao  ar- 
bitrarily appointed  from  Tokio,  and 
consented  to  follow  the  German  prece- 
dent and  work  under  Peking  only  after 
a  wholesale  concession  in  the  proportion 
of  Japanese  officials  in  the  territory  they 
have  appropriated  in  Shantung. 

Such  are  examples  of  the  drift  of  af- 
fairs by  which  we  may  judge  the  im- 
minence and  urgency  of  China's  peril. 
The  Japanese  have  the  unfailing  ca- 
pacity  of   never  removing   their   foot 


230     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

once  they  have  set  it  down  on  a  desir- 
able location  for  national  progress. 
Their  present  determination  is  un- 
doubtedly the  most  serious  menace  im- 
aginable to  the  continuance  of  that 
solidarity  which  China  within  recent 
years  has  struggled  desperately  to  make 
good.  The  old  vision  of  clutching 
hands  again  comes  vividly  to  her  mind. 
Despite  Japan's  promises  and  protesta- 
tions, China  justly  regards  her  inter- 
ference with  distrust  and  consterna- 
tion. China  is  a  nation  whose  poten- 
tialities for  peace  are  impressive  and 
profound,  if  she  is  allowed  to  work  out 
her  destiny  by  herself.  But  China 
weak,  humiliated,  and  overrun  with  for- 
eign aggression  may  become  the  battle- 
field of  a  war  beside  which  even  the 
present  conflict  may  be  insignificant. 
To  the  interests  of  fair  play  for  China 
is  thus  joined  the  universal  interest  of 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     231 

peace,  and  both  are  bound  up,  for  our- 
selves and  for  the  rest  of  the  world,  in 
the  preservation  at  all  costs  of  the  in- 
tegrity of  the  Chinese  nation  against 
whosoever  shall  assail  it. 


VII 

THE   FUTURE 

1HAVE  endeavored  in  this  little 
book  to  do  two  things:  first,  to 
bring  home  to  Western  readers  a  series 
of  direct  impressions  of  present-day 
China,  impressions  which  I  hope  will 
bring  home  to  the  imagination  some- 
thing of  the  quahty  of  mind  under 
which  that  country  is  now  going  for- 
ward ;  and  second,  to  set  forth,  in  a  few 
broad  strokes  of  general  policy,  the 
stirring  and  complicated  series  of 
crises  which  constitute  its  immediate 
historical  background. 

Unquestionably,  as  I  hope  has  been 
made  clear,  the  political  future  of  China 

232 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     233 

is  conditioned  by  Japan — and  the  re- 
straints put  on  Japan  by  the  major 
European  powers — and  by  ourselves. 
But  the  future  of  China  as  conditioned 
by  itself  depends  more  essentially  than 
on  any  other  single  factor  on  the 
economic  progress  of  the  Chinese  peo- 
ple. The  pressure  of  persistent  civic 
instability  during  the  Revolution  pre- 
vented this  subject  from  being  even 
considered,  much  less  constructively 
thought  out,  throughout  the  early  Re- 
publican period.  The  pressure  of  the 
threatened  foreign  aggression  from 
Japan  to-day  makes  it  almost  as  equally 
remote  from  the  practical  consideration 
of  the  best  minds  of  the  nation.  But 
the  time  is  destined  to  come,  and  the  set- 
tlement following  the  European  war 
may  clear  the  ground  for  it  sooner  than 
many  of  us  expect,  when  the  economic 
and    industrial    potentialities    of    the 


234     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Chinese  people  will  begin  to  figure  defi- 
nitely in  the  grand  strategy  of  world 
power. 

The  heart  of  a  nation's  industrial  life 
rests  on  its  railways.  If  China  had  the 
power  to  build  up  a  great  railway  sys- 
tem suited  solely  to  the  needs  of  her 
economic  and  commercial  development, 
if  she  herself  could  plan  to  tap  her  enor- 
mous material  resources  on  some  great, 
constructive  plan  based  on  her  own  in- 
terests, and  only  incidentally  on  the  in- 
terests of  her  exploiting  customers, 
there  would  be  no  "problem"  of  Chinese 
railway  development.  But  that  is  not 
the  way  potentially  rich,  but  politically 
weak  and  indigent  nations  are  treated 
in  this  capitalistic  world.  The  Chinese 
railway  situation  is  to-day  the  essential 
barometer,  locally  and  nationally,  of 
foreign  control.  And  the  extent  of 
that  control  may  be  learned  at  once  by 


'l"he   Rocket   of   China"    (is.sl),    made   of   scrap   iion 


Tin      I'eking-Hankow    Limited    Flyer  (I'.UH) 
THE    OLD    AND    THE    NEW    IX    ]>ncOMOTTVES 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     235 

a  glance  at  the  ownership  and  manage- 
ment of  China's  existing  15,000  miles  of 
railways,  built,  building,  and  contracted 
for. 

The  figures  of  this  table  are  ap- 
proximate, but  they  disclose  in  a  manner 
which  needs  no  further  comment  the  ex- 
tent to  which  China  is  mistress  in  her 
own  house  in  the  factor  which  is  the 
absolute  sine  qua  non  of  her  industrial 
development : 

Miles         Building  or 
Capital  Con-  Contracted 
structcd  for 
*  Under  Complete 
Foreign    Man- 
agement     $330,000,000      2470                1300 

Under      Foreign 

Control   400,000,000       1568  G900 

Under       Chinese 

Control   128,000,000       1895  361 

Totals    $858,000,000      5933  9561 

In  other  words,  out  of  15,494  miles 
of  railway,  built,  building,  or  author- 

*  Based  on  the  China  Year  Book. 


236     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

ized,  amounting  in  capital  to  $858,000,- 
000,  China  herself  controls  less  than 
2000  miles  of  road,  or  one  seventh  of  the 
total,  and  $128,000,000  of  capital  in- 
vestment, or  less  than  one  sixth  of  the 
total. 

China,  it  should  be  noticed,  also 
stands  in  a  great  deal  better  position 
to-day  than  she  will  stand  as  the  build- 
ing program  of  9561  miles  goes  for- 
ward ;  for  the  new  construction  is  over- 
whelmingly under  foreign  control. 
This  fundamental  point  should,  then, 
be  got  into  the  mind  first ;  that  the  rail- 
ways of  China  are  bound  to  be  in  the 
main,  so  far  as  the  immediate  future  is 
concerned,  stakes  of  foreign  interest. 
And  this  foreign  interest,  whether  it  be 
reasonably  generous  toward  Chinese 
sovereignty,  as  in  the  case  of  the  terms 
of  the  Tientsin-Pukow  line,  or  whether 
it  insists  on  absolute  foreign  control,  as 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHINA     237 

in  the  case  of  the  Shanghai-Xanking 
Railway,  reserves  an  ultimate  power  in 
the  hands  of  the  lending  persons  which 
inevitabty  comes  to  be  regarded  in  the 
diplomatic  and  political  world  as  a 
powerful  and  negotiable  asset. 

The  second  point  to  understand  is 
that  it  is  by  the  strategic  configuration 
of  these  railways  that  the  "spheres  of  in- 
terest" which  have  long  since  nullified, 
or  ratlier  prevented  the  establishment 
(for  there  never  was  such  a  thing)  of 
the  Open  Door,  take  on  their  definite 
character.  I  have  worked  out  the  way 
that  these  railroads  are  apportioned 
among  the  nations,  basing  my  figures 
on  estimates  from  the  latest  "China 
Year  Book"  (1914) ,  and  on  subsequent 
and  private  information,  somewhat  as 
follows : 


238     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

Miles         Building  or 
Capital  Con-  Contracted 

structed  for 

England   $140,000,000  845  3000 

Germany*     80,000,000  732  900 

Belgium    115,000,000  291  2500 

Russia     200,000,000  1100                 

Japan    125,000,000  780  1200 

France    62,500,000  290  1300 

U.   S.  A.    (share 

of    four-power 

loan)    7,500,000       300 

China     128,000,000  1895  361 

$858,000,000      5933  9561 

To  any  one  who  seeks  possible  causes 
for  another  world  war,  this  table  show- 
ing the  mixed  and  competing  foreign 
control  of  China's  railway  systems  is  by 
no  means  a  merely  academic  piece  of 
figuring.  The  control  of  the  Baghdad 
Railway  is  one  of  the  capital  issues  of 
the  present  war;  the  control  of  the 
South  Manchurian  Railway  was  as 
valuable  and  much  desired  a  prize  to 
Japan  as  the  free  hand  in  Korea,  over 

*  Before  the  War. 


PRESENT-DAY  CHIXA     239 

which  she  ostensibly  threw  herself  into 
the  war  with  Russia.  In  the  present 
balance  of  power  among  China's  rail- 
way concessions,  there  are  situations 
quite  as  delicate,  and  vast  prizes  of  in- 
dustrial conquest  and  development  quite 
as  decisive  in  their  strategic  importance 
as  any  for  which  the  greatest  wars  have 
been  waged  in  the  past. 

Take,  for  example,  the  single  instance 
of  the  concessions  held  by  Belgium, 
which  I  have  mentioned  several  times 
in  this  book,  and  which  I  particularly 
emphasized  in  the  previous  chapter.  If 
there  is  any  romance  in  railway  promo- 
tion, the  achievements  of  the  little 
group  of  Belgians  who  carried  off  in 
1912  and  1913  the  two  greatest  railway 
concessions  that  have  so  far  been  at 
stake  in  China,  constitute  without  any 
stretch  of  language  one  of  the  most  ro- 
mantic    business     operations     of     the 


240     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

modern  world.  The  projects  for  which 
they  were  then  conceded  the  full  rights 
by  the  Chinese  government  cut  China 
from  north  to  south  and  from  east  to 
west  along  lines  whose  immeasurable 
strategic  importance  has  not  yet  been 
adequately  realized. 

The  principal  concession,  named 
from  its  connections  the  Lung-Tsing- 
U-Hai  scheme,  proposes  to  run  from  an 
outlet  on  the  sea  not  yet  settled  some- 
thing like  fifteen  hundred  miles  into  the 
far  interior  of  China.  It  is  not  a  mere 
paper  project;  one  of  its  most  vital 
links,  that  between  China's  ancient  cap- 
ital, Kaifeng,  and  the  Honan  provincial 
capital,  Honanfu,  has  been  in  profitable 
operation  since  1908.  From  the 
Chinese  point  of  view  its  object  is  ob- 
scure, but  from  another  point  of  view  it 
is  plain  as  day.  After  leaving  the  city 
of  Sianfu  it  strikes  off  into  the  sparsely 


PRESEXT-DAY  CHIXA     241 

settled  deserts  and  arid  lands  of  Kansu 
toward  Suchow,  a  long  extension  into 
the  outer  wilderness  which  seems  inex- 
plicable in  view  of  the  still  urgent  need 
for  railroad  consolidation  within  the 
eighteen  provinces  of  China  proi:)er. 
Light  appears,  however,  when  you  re- 
member at  whom  this  long  finger  is 
pointing.  It  is  at  Russia,  whose  trans- 
Caspian  railways  have  already  crept 
up  to  the  other  side  of  this  great  hinter- 
land. Long  ago  Russia  mapped  out 
the  broad  lines  of  a  railway  which  would 
penetrate  the  heart  of  China  should  the 
Japanese  wrest  from  them  the  connect- 
ing links  in  South  INIanchuria  of  the 
trans-Siberian;  and  strange  to  say,  the 
great  Belgian  concession  matches  their 
route  almost  mile  for  mile. 

The  other  Belgian  concession  is,  if 
anything,  even  more  impressive;  for  it 
introduces  France  as  the  active  partner 


242     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

of  Russia  in  using  Belgian  cat's-paws. 
It  is  a  north-and-south  railroad,  run- 
ning through  the  great  anthracite  coal 
province  of  Shansi,  and  with  the  spe- 
cially granted  right  of  a  southerly 
extension  to  the  Szechwan  city  of 
Chengtu,  on  the  Yang-tse  River. 
Now,  Chengtu  happens  also  to  be  the 
northern  terminus  of  the  great  French- 
conceded  railroad  running  north  from 
the  heart  of  the  French  sphere  of  inter- 
est at  Yunnanfu,  a  road,  which,  during 
its  latter  stages  is  the  French  section  of 
the  Hankow- Szechwan  trunk  line. 
Broadly  speaking,  the  junction  of  these 
two  schemes  opens  up  a  clear  way  for 
the  French  through  the  rich,  back-coun- 
try provinces  of  China — to  what  ?  The 
northerly  extension  of  the  Belgian  proj- 
ect, also  specially  provided  for,  is 
Kweihwachen,  a  frontier  city,  outside 
the  Wall,  on  the  borders  of  the  Gobi 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     243 

Desert  of  Mongolia.  A  railway  is  al- 
ready crawling  up  in  this  direction  from 
Peking,  under  Chinese  government 
control,  the  famous  Peking-Kalgan 
line,  a  line  which  is,  by  the  way,  al- 
though entirely  in  Chinese  hands,  the 
most  creditable  piece  of  railroad  con- 
struction and  administration  in  China. 

This  railhead-to-be,  then,  at  Kweih- 
wachen — whom  does  it  face?  Who 
controls  Mongolia;  who  has  already 
surveyed  a  line  to  Urga;  who,  indeed, 
has  had  a  fixed  policy  ever  since  the 
completion  of  the  trans-Siberian  of  aim- 
ing for  a  short  cut  to  Peking  that 
would  keep  out  of  range  of  the  Japa- 
nese? Who  but  Russia,  seeking  again 
the  road  to  empire  from  which  she  has 
been  thrust  back  by  England  at  the 
gates  of  India  and  whipped  back  by 
Japan  from  Manchuria  and  Korea? 

Add  to  this  the  French  invasion  of 


244     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

the  West  River  territory  by  the  rail- 
way announced  on  February  13,  1914 
(Yunnanfu-Nanning-Yamchow),  a 
territory  which  the  British  had  hoped 
and  still  hope  to  open  up  for  them- 
selves, and  it  becomes  plainly  apparent 
that  the  competition  against  England 
on  the  part  of  France  and  Russia  is 
bound  to  proceed  to  proportions  of  no 
less  than  continental  magnitude. 
Roughly  speaking,  the  1914  conces- 
sions of  Great  Britain  complete  for  her 
the  practical  control  of  the  great  tri- 
angular area  between  Shanghai,  Han- 
kow, and  Canton,  from  the  Yang-tse 
Basin  south.  The  Belgian  trans-con- 
tinental railway  enters  the  Yang-tse 
Basin  on  the  north;  at  any  rate  it  is 
hard  to  conceive  that  it  will  keep  out  of 
this  territory,  for  possible  outlets  on  the 
sea  are  limited  as  to  commercial  oppor- 
tunities, and  there  is  hardly  a  terminus 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     245 

that  could  be  chosen  that  would  not 
create  a  fundamental  rivalry  with  the 
deeply  entrenched  British  interests  al- 
ready on  the  ground.  There  is  abso- 
lutely no  dodging  the  issue  that  if  the 
Belgian  projects  mean  anything  at  all, 
they  mean  to  fix  the  pivot  of  a  ri- 
valry between  Russia  and  France  on 
the  one  hand  and  Great  Britain  on  the 
other  that  may  have  far-reaching  con- 
sequences, even  after  the  settlement  of 
this  war. 

This  instance  of  the  railroad  situa- 
tion may  be  repeated  in  the  case  of  al- 
most every  great  commercial  potential- 
ity in  China.  It  is  a  railway  from  Kiu- 
kiang,  on  the  Yang-tse,  down  to  Swa- 
tow  in  Fukien  Province,  that  still  hangs 
as  a  smoldering  issue  between  Eng- 
land and  Japan;  Japan  amazed  the 
world  by  boldly  demanding  it  from 
China  in  the  never-to-be-forgotten    se- 


246     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

ries  of  demands  of  the  spring  of  1915, 
seemingly  oblivious  to  the  fact  that  it 
cuts  across  territory  that  has  been  the 
one  really  acknowledged  British  sphere 
of  interest  in  all  China. 

It  is  repeated  in  the  vast  Tayeh  iron 
mines  of  the  south  Yang-tse  valley, 
v^^hich  the  covetousness  of  Japan  may 
yet  make  a  first-class  diplomatic  issue, 
along  with  the  great  Hanyehping  steel 
plant  of  Hanyang.  America,  in  the 
name  of  self -accredited  missionaries  of 
the  Standard  Oil  Company,  has  made  a 
striking  bid  for  the  control  of  China's 
vast  oil  fields,  which,  though  it  has  re- 
ceived a  temporary  check,  has  given 
that  far-seeing  company  first  innings  in 
what  is  admitted  to  be  the  greatest  un- 
developed oil-field  of  the  known  world. 

A  book  could  be  written  on  the  man- 
ufacturing field  alone,  particularly  on 
the  most  extensive  and  characteristic  of 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     247 

all  its  manifestations  so  far  in  China,  in 
the  cotton  mills.  The  center  of  the  cot- 
ton industry  is  at  Shanghai,  mainly  in 
English,  Japanese,  and  Chinese  hands; 
it  enjoys  there  the  privilege  of  a  prac- 
tically unrestricted  exploitation  of  la- 
bor, maintaining  conditions  which  were 
described  at  this  year's  Nurses'  Con- 
gress at  Shanghai  as  "a  disgrace  to  civ- 
ilization." It  offers  the  greatest  field 
for  social  reform  outside  of  Japan.  I 
must  be  content,  however,  with  stat- 
ing the  principle  which  this  irresist- 
ible development  is  more  and  more 
forcefully  expressing.  That  is,  that 
this  vast  reservoir  of  economic  power, 
the  greatest  that  has  been  opened 
up  to  the  world  in  modern  times,  con- 
stitutes for  us  of  the  Western  world 
a  menace  that  the  European  war  has 
only  taught  us  dimly  to  foresee.  The 
struggle  for  the  control  of  this  power 


248     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

has  only  been  suspended  during  the 
war;  it  will  inevitably  be  resumed. 
And  if  contemporary  statesmen  are 
looking  for  issues  on  which  the  oft-re- 
peated prediction — that  if  the  Allies 
win  this  war,  they  will  only  fall  out 
among  themselves — may  be  fulfilled, 
the  danger  portents  on  the  tightening 
lines  of  competition  for  power  in  the 
Far  East  are  only  too  apparent. 

We  Americans  look  across  the  sea  at 
this  harassed  nation  full  of  such  great 
and  such  terrible  possibilities  for  the  im- 
mediate future  of  the  world,  with  min- 
gled feelings.  There  is  a  terror  in  the 
present  circumstances  of  our  war-worn 
time,  so  pressing  and  so  near  that 
we  cannot  feel  the  possibility  of  still 
greater  dangers  preparing  on  the  same 
lines  as  the  present  conflict,  based 
on  the  same  competition  for  markets, 
the    same   world-end   international   ri- 


PRESENT-DAY  CHINA     249 

valry,  in  a  world  that  can  apparently 
learn  no  lessons  from  its  own  history. 
We  are  also  obsessed  with  a  danger  of 
our  own,  a  gathering  misunderstanding 
and  bad  feeling  with  Japan,  that  will 
take  the  most  delicate  judgment  and 
the  most  conciliatory  spirit  possible  to 
both  nations  to  allay. 

But  so  far  as  we  can  with  a  just  re- 
gard for  our  own  destiny  stand  for  a 
foreign  policy  based  on  conditions  out- 
side our  own  country,  we  should  guard 
and  guard  jealously  whatever  oppor- 
tunities we  have  of  aiding  in  the  con- 
solidation of  China — the  only  possible 
and  the  only  courageous  policy  which 
can  in  any  way  minimize  the  danger  of 
a  world  war  with  this  nation's  economic 
power  as  its  stake.  China's  future  is 
not  yet  merely  a  Japanese  question,  but 
we  can  only  prevent  its  becoming  a 
Japanese  question  by  making  it  a  world 


250     PRESENT-DAY  CHINA 

question.  What  has  followed  the  parti- 
tion of  Turkey  has  shown  clearly  what 
would  in  even  greater  degree  follow 
either  the  partition  of  China,  its  absorp- 
tion or  control  by  one  power,  or  any 
other  eventuality  permanently  disturb- 
ing the  balance  of  power  in  the  Far 
East.  The  weakness  of  Turkey  has 
been  a  European  policy ;  and  after  half 
a  century  of  lying  settlements,  and  an 
enfeebling  diplomacy  which  is  self-con- 
demned in  the  word  it  has  given  to  the 
world — Turkification — that  long  plun- 
dered land  has  been  revenged  on  its 
plunderers  by  being  one  of  the  primary 
causes  of  the  greatest  war  civilization 
has  ever  seen.  Let  us  recognize  in  time 
the  application  of  this  portent  to  China. 
There  is  only  one  secure,  there  is  only 
one  honorable,  there  is  only  one  Ameri- 
can conclusion:  The  upbuilding  of 
China  is  vital  to  the  peace  of  the  world. 


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